Tantalum makes me hungry

COAL CAVE

Pure Anthracite. Potentially flammable. Polished mirror-smooth in uneven shapes. Travellers have stepped to random sections of the wall and slowly rubbed their reflections into view. If you do this, and stare within the coal-glass for a time, angels will beckon you. They will come in strange phantasmagorial forms and silently promise secrets and revelations. No-one can see anothers angels. They are lies.

TANTALUM VEIN

There is an exposed vein of clearly valuable metal running in this cave. It could be quite handy in a number of ways. But is is quixotically placed. You are always a little too far from Tantalum to make use of it.

TITANIUM ETCHED BY FAILED BEHOLDER STRIKES

Braided by exposed titanium ore. The ore is pure. Its ripped with criss-crossed lateral diagonal lines in bright metallic discolour-stains. Imperial murderer-purple, witch-eye green, dark-sun yellow-red, pervslinger pink and boiling blue. The lines crosshatch negative-image manlike forms in shapes that suggest some distress. On inspection, the organic bleeds of colour into ore are quite beautiful.

NOT DARK NOR SOMBRE WHOLELLEY

One faint eternal eventide of gems. This cave was once an egg of rock within a vast magmatic flow. It crystallised inside, leaching rare and tainted carbons from the ultradense surge. Every compassed space is built from semiprecious stones. Amethyst, carnelian, agate. Glowing and flashing in dark bands like starfields seen by shadowed astronauts. Sharp with a vague-nebulae glow and shaping the darkness like the buzzing of a wasp shapes silence in an empty room.

GRAVATIC TWIST

At some point in its history gravity in this cave has been other than it is now. All the symptoms of erosion, water flow and calcite seepage are tilted 90 degrees from the way you expect. Speleothems grow across the cave from the walls, not up and down. Water cuts channels and leaves flowstone in the side not the floor. It was like this for a long time. There is no sign when it will change again.

HOKUSAI WAVE CAVE

This cave is mirrored in three dimensions to create a negative space. Like Hokusai's Wave when you turn the picture upside down. If you enter through a field of stalagmites reaching twenty feet, then at the other end will be and identical mirror-reversed field of stalactites hanging twenty feet. The cave mirrors in as many axis as you can comfortably manage.

If you turn it upside down there is another wave made of the empty space, but you probably knew that

SUMMERHAND CAVE

In summer you can place your hand flat over your open eye. The light seeps through your skin and lights your flesh inside. The glowing red-black-red of sunlight through your hand is the colour of this cave. Of the rock. Not bright enough to light the space, but present, like the phosphorescence at the centre of gems.

TV-SCREEN-DEEP

The colour of an old television screen just after it shuts down. Deep, deep inside: a tiny inverse you-shape staring back. The surface is staticky with fuzzy tangible electromagnetism like rubbed balloons and old technology. Impenetrable to magical sight, either way. May burn with moving black and white grains when someone tries to see through.

PSEUDOLITH

A built room carefully disguised to look exactly like a natural cave. The walls are plaster over brick or worked stone. The Speleothems are columns carved like natural forms. The organic wanderings are carefully designed. This could be the disguised watch-room for an Undercity long lost, a piece of weird decadent art, a dead Drow's folly, a deliberate magical act, forgotten training-place or careful temple. Possible secret doors. Possible ambush.

HAIR BRAID CAVE

An ancient lava bed makes up one surface. Twists of ropey rock make a roof like a giant rasta's dreadlocks. Thick knots of fresh-looking organic-seeming basalt interweaving but flowing one way. Good way to climb if its the wall. Nightmare if its the floor.

a sausage being forced through a damp doughnut

PERVOTHEMS

Sausages forced through wet doughnuts. Flesh ellipses with peanuts at the top. Round dual mounds with central nubs. Flanged cylindrical stalagmites. Round black puckered exits with enfolding globes. Every single thing in this cave looks like or reminds the viewer of sex. Keep this up until the players are disgusted and depressed. Then keep doing it.

LENS CAVE

Polished rock like an upturned bowl. Bulging smooth and jointless, glasslike and slippy. Footprints fade like fingermarks on black screens. The ceiling bulges mirrorwise. They bend to reaching distance at the core. Stand there and hand-link the orbs:- get charged with cosmic rays! harmless, but you buzz with purple kirbydots for a time and hippys think you're 'cool'. Somewhere miles below a watching Archean sees your blurry blocking shape occlude their view.

CARVED CAVE MEGA-TALE

The walls are carved with one continuous story wrapping the walls like the snake game from a cheap phone, waving and curling in impossible lines, mazing itself and repeating, swerving obliquely. Sometimes eroded or obscured but always there. The story of everything that ever has or ever will happen in that cave, from its geological birth to distant death.

STONE MONKEY CAVE

Stone Monkeys! This is a simple cave made from endless tessliated stone monkeys clinging onto each other. You tread on their motionless snarling faces and their marble eye-orbs grate horrifically en-masse as they follow you round the room. A magic word makes the monkeys re-incorporate themselves into a new cave with different exits. Poke your eyes In between the monkeys limbs, there's nothing there. A wizard did this for no reason.

XENOLITH BURG

This cave winds inside a green alien rock. Not a meteorite but an interiorite. Falling counter-orbital in the magmatic flow, crystallising from the liquid stone like a green ballistic pearl. Impacting on the undercrust and resting here. Green like leaves of climbing plants. Olivine and embedded thickly with Chromite crystals.

OBSIDIAN BRICKS

Bricks of black, glassy volcanic rock. Polished smooth then aged, buried and riddled with bright lichen. The bricks are held by spiderwebs of sparkling iron pyrites. Beneath the smooth facing the walls are dull tessile dice-shaped obsidian chunks. Perhaps a sunken dungeon foundation or scatterfrags of bomb impacted temple sites.

GLAZED CAVE

Smooth wedgewood-white china walls and swallowflight emblazments in Ming blue. A whole constructed thing. Gigantic cave-shaped anti-vase made to be traversed. Ways in and out wreathed in abyssal willowmarks. Faint blue dancing myconid lines filigree the paths, happy Trapper sunbursts at the top.

NEON CYSTS

Warty cancer lumps of pale discoloured glass. Volcanic-lymphatic strands rippling the rock and bulging. Swelled like slow balloons by noble gas. Flickering dimly, ruby-red, igniting in spasmodic lines in time with distant lightning strikes, aetheric and magmatic lightning too. Like a really creepy Berlin bar.

BLACK CURLS LIKE MELTED CROWS

Dead and black like executed Goth mopheads. Scattered patternless on walls, ceiling and floor. Each obeying a personal gravity, collapsing like crushed cans. If cracked, just more black curls and clawshards, onion-ringed round nothing.

A FIELD OF BLEEDING CADMIUM SUNS

This chemical pigment-poison leaks through the stone in irregular blotches. Fierce primary synthetic stains like burning matcheads in pre-school blue, fire-truck red, smiling-sun yellow and blob-tree green. Pigments bleeding down like unfixed paints. It's toxic, not poison, but bad for you.

MAGNESIUM VEIN TREES

Magnesium boxwork. The branching ore protrudes like knots on old mens hands. The ore holds hidden specks of elemental shine. Slick with black oil. The ore-trees branch and prick some ancient seam of crude. The oil drips down the tarnished silver trees. Protecting them from water and the air. Scrape it off and douse the vein and trees will incandesce in ultra-violet flame.

A THRONE OF GOLD

A pyratized throne. It's probably a metaphor for something. Gold, with fat lego-block pyrite crystals. A random accretion of semi-precious metallic stone in the chance shape of a chair. Revealed by the natural action of the cave. Fragile, almost impossible to move, will break if used.

FOSSILISED HIVE

Men, or natural forces, have smashed through empty stone hexagonal cells. An ancient hive of dog-sized wasps. Walls and roof and floor still show the steady grid of larval beds. Some closed caps conceal amberised grubs. The floor is crunchy-thick with stone mandible fragments, translucent limestone tracery wings and blunted stings.

WHISPER WALLS

The oddly curving wall holds secret talk. Press your ear to the stone and speak quietly and you can converse with anyone doing the same anywhere in the same cave. (Sometimes you will hear the illusory whispering of the dead and dammed. Plus predators will use it to trace and fool you.)

a dancing dwarf made me do this

Scrap Princess promised/threatened to send the dancing dwarf from twin peaks into my mind to get me to finish this. So this title actually does make sense.

Here are the first ten (of fifty) aesthetic cave qualities.

SANDSTONE TRACKMARKS

Dunewaves of desert stone. Sun-bright granular rock. Animal track patternings. Preserved fingertip skittles of insect feet. Prey and ancient predator converge, your pressed fingers trace the path.

CARBONISED TREES

A forest baked by ferocious motionless fire. Single black empty-tracery leaves spill from the decaying roof. Puff to charcol dust when they hit. Loud sounds dislodge whole abandoned trunks. The tree-trunks drift like leaves and shatter into weightless choking smoke, barbecue ash and coal-black enfolding mist.

PARAPLEGIC ANGEL OF DEATH

Crippled death scars. Hate marks killing and crawling, black cuneiform scars. Exits are all 10 feet up or more. Walls and floor are stone but black and gouged with finger tears. Rock floor is pounded and hammered flat. A spray of eternal burning ash in a CSI bodyform lies twisted, wings broken.

TITANRIBS CORPSE CAVE

Cathedral clavicle rocks and a linear nodular spine. Organic regularity. White sails in stone. The skull is somewhere, unless a crab got it. Deathwounds may be observed. Oreantation may be irregular depending how the Titan fell.

CEPHALAPOD HYPER FOSSIL

Delicate stones to hold the dead-squid-swirl. Embroideries of slate or anthracite gusts. It curls climbing overhead, centring on the embossed trunk and breaching adamant beak. Like a fucked-up sunset. The black ink beads and drips, to be released by blows.

SPERM WHALE GRAVEYARD

Bone whales breach the dying stone as if in flight. Floors of car-sized scissor jaws and pulverised bone. Fist-sized fossilised orcateeth. A radiator-grill krill-comb. Exposed bones sing in grave cave winds. Low, slow songs that remind you of the sea. Sad and peaceful, weep and return one hit point.

FULGINIOUS RANIBOW

A viscous sky-wash of oil, tainted ash and post-nuclear pigments in ravenwing spectra. Bomb rupture cycle marks. A ceiling bow of very particular black locked in eroded stone. We only see the outer lines. The centre is visual static

STEEL FOLD FURROW

A fingernail can find the ridged steel under the oxidised scrape. The cave pitted cavity within a great and rusted sword. A blade edge cave. One steel wall between things. One exit a corroded gate of rust. A keen climb and a whining wind. A bright horizon, slender, silver and blood-sharp.

WORD-HOARD

A cave of compounded clay. Washing to mud if a river runs through. The sunken library ruin of an ancient empires mind. The cave burrows through the compressed clay books. Walls are tablets shattered and squeezed, I-Pad-sized and pillow shaped. Time and blows loose chunks of ancient script, unreadable and falling into dust.

SPELEOMEN

Slumped low snoozing calcite men like sleepers covered with a sheet. White and wet, running with vague pinks and discoloured sunset blues. Stalactites are victim shrouds, ankle-hung like bad tarot. Oozing pearly drops to birth their sleeping kin. (Chill, there are not dudes inside. It's chance and flowing stone.)

Does she even know how to call off the dwarf?

lets get this shit done

Afternoons at the pub have birthed this list for column two. Lets get this table fucking finished.

SANDSTONE TRACKMARKS

CARBONISED TREES

PARAPLEGIC ANGEL OF DEATH

TITANRIBS CORPSE CAVE

CEPHALAPOD HYPER FOSSIL

SPERM WHALE GRAVEYARD

FULGINIOUS RANIBOW

STEEL FOLD FURROW

WORD-HOARD

SPELEOMEN

SEX-REMIND CAVE

LENS CAVE

CARVED CAVE MEGA-TALE

STONE MONKEY CAVE

XENOLITH BURG

OBSIDIAN BRICKS

GLAZED CAVE

NEON CYSTS

BLACK CURLS LIKE MELTED CROWS

A FIELD OF BLEEDING CADMIUM SUNS

MAGNESIUM VEIN TREES

A THRONE OF GOLD

FOSSILISED HIVE

WHISPER WALLS

DEAMON TUSK CAVE

DEATH HOPE MURAL

SCRIMSHAW MADNESS

COAL CAVE

SMELTING FURNACE

TANTALUM VEIN

COBALT KOBOLD CAVE

TITANIUM ETCHED BY FAILED BEHOLDER STRIKES

EUROPIUM UNION

RAPTUROUS SULPHATE BLEEDS

NOT DARK OR SOMBRE WHOLELLEY

INTERFERENCE PATTERNS

GRAVATIC TWIST

HOKOUSAI WAVE CAVE

SUMMERHAND CAVE

TV-SCREEN-DEEP

PSEUDOLITH

LOCK PICK CAVE

ROCK MILK TEATS

LEAF SHADOW SHARDS

HAIR BRAID CAVE

GIANTS PAUSEWAY

AMMUNITICO RUSSO

PYROXENE RIDDLES

Occultum

You're probably wondering, "if magic is real, how the fuck didn't Merlin crack onto ATOMS? Huh? Answer that!"

Of course he did. That knowledge was just to dangerous to share.

from Hugh Aldersey-Williams

"The case of Occultum presents the other side of the balance sheet – an elemental find claimed not by learned men of science but by self-avowed mystics, yet reliant, just like Lockyer's claim to helium, on visual evidence produced by arcane means and only directly witnessed by a select few observers.

Occultum was the 'discovery' of Annie Besant and Charles Leadbetter. Besant was a leading light in the theosphist religious movement, a clairvoyant, a feminist activist and a leading political radical of the Victorian period. With Leadbetter, a former Anglican preacher, she wrote many books, among them one called Occult Chemistry, a fusion of these later interests with what she had learned while studying chemistry as one of the first women undergraduates at London University. This volume, first published in 1909 and later running to several editions, gave exhaustive and precise descriptions of the appearance of individual atoms of many of the elements as they first appeared to Leadbetter and then, under his tutelage, to Besant, viewed by the 'third eye' of clairvoyance.

The atoms were illustrated by Curuppumullage Jinarajadasa, Leadbetter's young Singhalese companion...

They started with an attempt to observe 'a molecule of gold.' but apparently found it 'far too elaborate a structure to be described'. Leadbetter had better luck with hydrogen, which he announced had a countable number of minor atoms 'arranged on a definite plan'. This simplest of elements 'was seen to consist of six small bodies, contained in an egg-like form. It rotated with great rapidity on it's own axis, vibrating at the same time, and the internal bodies performed similar gyrations '.

 

They observed an atom 'so light, and so simple in its composition, we thought that it might be helium'.

In 1907, Leadbetter and Besant did finally obtain some helium gas and subjected it to the mysterious scrutiny of the 'third eye'. They pronounced themselves surprised that 'it proved to be quite different from the object before observed, so we dubbed the un recognised object Occultum, until orthodox science shall find it and label it in proper fashion.'

And we never did, becasue we are a race of cowards. Afraid to plumb subatomic marvels with our Third Eye.

I have been thinking about an underdark ultra-currency. Something you could carry in your pocket but use to buy a kingdom. Like that insane super-coin scheme we heard about from america recently. Individaully carved gem-coin-art? Mind-flayer ivory scrimsaw? Vials of Aboleth oil?

Now I have it, coins of pure Occultum. Shadowy blurred edgeless discs.  Semi-sentient currency that chooses to move unseen, by fraud or theft. Blue like sulphuric fires, darkness visible. God-bribe coin, Liche-hoard coin, the dark currency, soul-scrip, black cash, bluebacks, the terror-tender.

 

Drinking and Thinking about Robots

I invented these Mechs for a game I'm playing with some friends set in a distant-future mars. Somewhere in the middle it turned into a lecture from a wise old caln advisor to a young heir.

ORCNEAS

Orcneas is a flat smooth oval of unknown origin and design. It was clearly designed to brave the tides of some alien sea, or the core -winds of a Jovain Giant. But some remark on the thickness of its hull, the inexplicable strangelet-scarification swirling in momentary iridescence in the red Martian light, clinging sparks of unknown shade waving and rippling in violent fractal curls just as the creature skylines in the dying sun. They say Orcneas went somewhere terrible. That it was never meant to return.

The limbs are of more recent design, only a few thousand years old. Eight titanic monomolecular spider-crab limbs, flaking endlessly in paper-thin confetti-shards. Children keep the discarded metallic curls as good luck charms. The limbs are renewed slowly from within by some forgotten process fed by the still-humming core. The power still flowing over uncounted millennia, engineered for a timeless watch somewhere beyond the sight of man.

The two front limbs have four-fingered hands. The front legs walk on car-sized knife-bright claws. Within the shell, the Signal blade.

SIGNAL is the only still-legible word on the energy projector inside Orcneas. Its beams gash gold-vermillion and the blade itself is named in the death song scratched in mono-carbon ruins in the shadow of Olympus Mons. What work it did there long ago no-one can remember.

FROST-FETTER

Frost-Fetter is old, as old as one of the great cyclic terraforming events of Mars, perhaps the first. She is a tall tripod, moving with unnerving grace on delicate tips. We know she was not made to kill, but to work great crafts upon the planets living flows. Yet we must use her so, and be glad of it.

The tripod core houses a lance of ice. A burning ray that freezes all it strikes and that cannot fail. Legends speak of Frost-Fetter surviving hordes through her speed, her dancing legs and her inexhaustible freezing light. On each side of her canopy are nests of prismatic tractomorphic tentacles. These can spiral and combine to form burning prisms that bleed fire. Some think that Frost-Fetter was made to mould and shape glaciers. Though not intended to, Frost-Fetters tentacles can be used as a man uses his hands, to hold and wield. An unexpected advantage. Much valued, and kept secret to the best of our ability.

STORM-WIFE

Storm-Wife guards the Tempest and holds the Star-Stone. Like Frost-Fetter he was not made to kill, but to preserve. Bards sing of a day when our hands are returned to their purpose and do not hold the sword. Perhaps those days have already past.

Storm-Wife was born in the night above the sky. Men walked there once. He was built to rescue those that fell, to preserve the traveller and safeguard the weak, an honourable design. His smooth white limbs, shaped like a man, and his delicate human hands were built to hold and preserve. Other houses may mock his frame. Remember the design. We have armoured him in crude steel, welded around his snow-bright skin and helmeted his pilot-dome in five-times-riveted metal cold. We have given him the Tempest, the greatest cannon we possess, the storm is crude some say, but this is a technology known to us. Her hundred-cal rounds give a sermon that will not be forgotten!

We have given him the Star-Stone. A fragment of ruined earth. Blasted into the darkness and plummeting into the Martian soil. The stone is meteoric iron. Burnt into runnels and channels by her blazing descent. Scooped and shaped in wild peaks with the covering rock scorched away. We have sharpened her, burnished her edges till they glow red like our sun. A haft we have long sought, and found. The black spindle-steel, it made the ruined helix that long ago reached up to the stars. We have traded much for this invincible metal. Now Star-Stone is ready. A mace like no other. Should Tempest fail, the stone shall answer.

But remember the design. They laugh at us and call us scavengers. But hidden in the war-shells hasp is the memory of the past. Of what we were, and could be again. He was made to guard lives. Do not dishonour his purpose.

WEEP-YET-I-DIE

Weep-yet-I-die you know. A scratch-built mining rig with nothing left to mine. Her drill-bits blunted, broken and abandoned. She is a work-horse now, as she has always been. She carries and labours while others fight. Four stout legs and her one rambling arm.

She has secrets yet though. One day soon you will go deep into her core and listen to the message hiding there. You will know the secret of her name.

A man long ago spoke of a ship, noted in war and preserved against time. He said that even though each part of this ship rotted and fell away that this ship itself, the pattern, remained. He said this was the secret of identity, not pieces contending against each other, but patterns, repeated and renewed. Selfhood.

Weep-yet-I-Die is the oldest of out Mechs. She has been replaced and renewed in every part but she has remained. Perhaps her lesser nature has saved her from the eyes of the powerful. Her lumbering stumbling gate is still fast enough to dodge the eye of history. She has been there. In every war, through every cataclysm. She has survived. Not always the same, but always in part. She is out true link to the past. The death message recorded inside her, from one of her first pilots, long long ago, can barely be understood. Men have changed much since then. But you will know those words when the dead men speaks them. Weep-yet-I-die. Those have not changed.

Tell no-one this.

I think that's fifty caves

SQUEEZE

A cave of cat-flap escapes.

A normal passable cave with 2d6 exits. Every escape is a squeeze.

Shoulder-high passage. Push a candle ahead of you. Trail one arm behind have one ahead. Pressed in on every side by rock. No turning around. You kiss the rock. Emerge with bleeding temples and crown from the close touch. Each squeeze is d4 miles long

BLOCKAGE

Building blocks. City blocks. Archeo-city foundation collapse.

Open with the roar of wind, the noise and dust-cloud. An ancient city fell five seconds ago and its foundation stones are in your way. To get through dig the cracks. Whistling wind pipes indicate passage. Claw the stone-soil, Ware the ebon glyphs. Past the 1^st dig the endless tilting roof is the flat foundation of cyclopean size, seen from below. (Getting past is easy, worm like a rat below the blocks, getting into the city above is months of work.)

VERTICAL SQUEEZE (PIZZA CHEESE)

Two cave linked only by vertical narrows.

The 1st cave curves like the first letter of your name, the 2^nd like the last. They are waist-bend-low. The only place to stand are these irregular holes leaping up (or down) that can barely be navigated. They are drawn out and thin like the cheese linking lifted pizza bits just before the cheese-thread snaps. Some mid-point lateral gaps.

METAMORPHIC TUBE

A train sized tube of altered stone.

Starts wide and smooth, the end may spindle out like a tree branch. Rock change tunnel spilling from the blood splatter of a dead gigabeing. The flowing fingers of its alteration intermixing on the walls in madly painted webs. The bloodsplatter sprays every direction. Divine ichor melts the rock, leaves bus-sized blood chunnels in a mighty web*. The god-corpse sinks to slowly orbit the iron heart. Leaves scattered frags of twisting tube. Spooky in there, dreams of a dying pulse.

*If you found them all and mapped them en-mass, accounting for tectonic time, you'd know what kind of weapon killed the god, and solve the crime.

WALK IN THE PARK

There is nothing strange about this cave at all. Do not tell the players this.

MAGNETIC SPRING (CARBONIC ACID)

Violence bleeds the air.

The water crawls up fennite runnels iron rails and spikes. Like a milky fizzy drink. It fucks your compass. when blades come out the water springs alive and dances with the knives. Any miss with a metal weapon catches, beads and pearls of water roll across the blade shining like forgotten mercury. Each clash leaves misty furrows curling in the air. The more you fight, the more you are coated with the pearly viscous acidic slime.

ROCKLUNG

Lung-shaped caves. Full of poison, gales, and fire.

Wind-heart air valve with a rhythmic beat, may be made in ancient times to send gusty flows about the underground. Climb around the jewelled alveoli. Bronchial paths, air loops through. Numerous Oxide helictites with Highly flammable pure O2 wscreaming through the tips. Azathoth pipes. Don't light them or bring flame near. Can become a death-oven very quickly. Other lung can suffocate you, you turn blue inside. They switch. Leap back and forth to survive. May pulsate.

WAITOMO WORMS

Cave lit by glowing green predatory ceiling grubs

The cave is clear and greenly lit. Wormlight hides the sticky fishing strands. Dex test to move above slow speed. Fat green alien stars winking. Strands will wrap you up. Drift invisibly around you, curl you like stinging fog, slowing you and stuttering your limbs. If caught they hoist you up. Fight and you may pull down a pile of curled-cat sized angry glowing bugs wrapped around like biting fairy lights.

DOG JAWS

Tunnel through a groaning micro-fault.

One cake-cut of the earth moves counter-wise. Like waves crashing on opposite tracks, converging tsunamis. The entry cave, like dogs jaws fighting, locked together, gripping and growling from the broken stones. Look through the 'teeth' and see a deep abyss. The exit like the toilet roll tube unravelling, pulled from each end, spirals of stone with nothing in-between. The faults may twitch and shatter as you pass.