Arriving at the Abode of Departure

If you haven't seen it already, you might like what John Till did with that simple architect builder I posted the other day. He's developed his desert fortress-town - the remote Abode of Departure.

The introduction is here, the fuller overview here.

It's an eerily evocative location and I realise now that with the deep cistern network, hidden structures and gate, and stomach-churning fate that could well be waiting, it's potentially a campaign setting in itself. I don't know if I'd rather run it or be run through it, which is a possible measure of something just right.

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The First and Last Die

Chris pushed back the deadline for the stronghold contest so here's a last-minute entry.

The architect in the intro is the one I created for the example in the last post, and the theme ties in to the fractal gaming idea. The site is also a path between worlds so I'll add it to the list for the Ends. It doesn't need a map and is more or less system-neutral.

                                                                                                                              

The First and Last Die

My memories began the day the adventurers first found me, the day I sensed that unearthly movement, as of great rocks crashing together. They knew of my ability, my work to date, and as they asked questions the knowledge flooded in. I draughted for them, oversaw the creation of the stronghold, and my past life grew. A pity they found out about the masterplan... Still. I took up with them for some time, triggering traps, searching out secret doors, building mausoleums. I studied the works of the ancient architects from within. Then the last adventurers died, a total party kill, and life began to grow faint. I'd lived through them, for their otherworldy needs. Compelled from beyond.

Time at last for my one great work.

The glad lightness of a far future and alterpluristemics

The recent focus on paths among universes or settings set off some thinking here. What if the journey could be planned, or the destination known, or a traveller could move back and forth? You could import/export between paradigms. Then came the next thought...

Which item from any given setting or universe could really change the nature of another?

One that came to my mind was the flower from the classic Star Trek episode "This Side of Paradise". It sprayed spores that removed resistance to empathy and freer love - see the first video below. And I thought of the grim dark of a setting like the 41st millennium.

Wouldn't work? Xenophobia between the factions is just too strong? In the second - and potentially very offensive - video, of Richard Herring's Hitler Moustache, a train of thought starts at 3:32 in which Herring jokes that while many of us embrace the existence of so many nations, anyone who sees only Them and Us is just one step from universal love.

Of course, in a war-torn far future like M41, anywhere the flowers were planted could be subject to Exterminatus or the equivalent, and probably would be once their effects were known. Conflict can be made profitable, or be the sum total of experience or a source of identity - that we know. So what mechanism could be used to spread the love around?

Well, the Orks are a major, dynamic vector. And they multiply via spore release. What if a rogue xenobiologist or bad dok raised an Ork to produce the love spore too? Orks get everywhere and could inherit the galaxy. Now they'd share it. What would that mean?

At any rate, a transpluristemic path like one of those for the Ends, especially if it could be hacked or co-opted, or a follow-up found, could give rise to a new kind of protagonist: a figure who travels the settings, maybe the genres, altering them for a given purpose...

Coming to more great Ends...

John Till has just posted a stunningly good portal at Fate SF, the Anagogue, or Whirlpool Gate, a way to gain access to his Empire setting. He's happy to see it in the Ends list and it's welcome.

Two more from the brilliant Riskail have also just gone in, and to get the Maelstrom table finished finally, I'm going to be adding one entry a day until the end of the month. That will make six entries in total, for rolls using a d6.

If anyone adds a new entry in this time, I'll match it with one more and keep that up until we reach the number of the next standard die, whether that's a d8, d10, d12, d20 or d30.

It's about getting a set of watery arrivals in other worlds, to help games migrate between settings and universes. Here's an entry for today then, no. 4. Maybe it seems familiar...

     The descent into the Maelstrom... (1D4 so far)

     4. ... becomes a water chute pouring into a cavern holding a galleon, an Inferno.

Pretty much anything goes. Leave suggestions here or there - I'll credit every entry with a link. You can track progress using the graphic grid at the top of the right-hand sidebar.

Update: We're already up an entry, reaching no. 5 early, so it's going to eight at least...

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Where does a Maelstrom go?

Hereticwerks recently looked at the Maelstrom in gaming, with ideas for treating it as a monster or hazard to navigation, a basis for a terrain piece.

They also suggested it could be a gateway, maybe to a strange sea, or even a Weak Point between the worlds, possibly one of the more final Ends.

I'll definitely add this take on it to the Ends list, but it would be good to explore the idea and get some options, maybe a table to roll on for each descent.

That could be used in roleplaying for an encounter, or in weird wargaming for a campaign event, maybe as a way to move a long-term game to a new setting or transform it. In fiction overall it could be a good source of inspiration.

As an example destination, the original post gives the fluidic space of Voyager's species 8472, and I suggest it could be somewhere a flood washes up, like the Deadly Desert in Return to Oz, or that a traveller could become a water baby, as in the novel or 1978 film.

Like the portals list and the Ends itself, it's a good subject to crowdsource. If you have a suggestion, leave a comment. I'll expand the table and credit you with a link.

     The descent into the Maelstrom... (1d8)

1. ... carries the traveller into fluidic space. (Hereticwerks)
2. ... washes the traveller up in the Deadly Desert.
3. ... transforms the traveller into a water baby.
4. ... becomes a water chute pouring into a cavern holding a galleon, an Inferno.
5. ... with a hideous pause on the very threshold of bearability gives way to a cataract of surging, turgid unseen green waters cascading with a mighty roar into the heart of a fog-bound estuary just on the very verge of visibility. Some place long abandoned. Deserted. But very much alive. (garrisonjames)
6. ... wakes the traveller - who is afloat and wired up in a sensory deprivation tank.
7. ... fades to calm as the traveller emerges from a long-overgrown spawning pool.
8. ... builds to a convulsion, ejecting the traveller either into or from a bodily cavity.

There's more inspiration in the original post, and the first for the Ends could also help.

Update: Entries 4+ are being added now, as per this post. 

Update: All done - it's now one of the Ends.

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Community Project - The Ends

Here's the master list for The Ends, a community project for paths between worlds, to get ways of moving from one setting or universe to another. I'll be updating the post with new routes as they come. Anyone can jump in...

1. The barber's chair - the City to Wermspittle (Trey, From the Sorcerer's Skull)
2. The ornate painting - to the Sea of Stars (seaofstarsrpg)
3. The Gem of Muktra - to Zalchis (garrisonjames, Hereticwerks)
4. The Synchronocitor - point-A to point-C (garrisonjames, Hereticwerks)
5. The corroded metal plaque-like thing - unknown... (garrisonjames, Zalchis)
6. The Weak Points - to and from Wermspittle (garrisonjames, Hereticwerks)
7. A Tenebrous Scarlet Portal - many, various... (garrisonjames, Hereticwerks)
8. The Aeonic Synchropore - possibly to the past (garrisonjames, Hereticwerks)
9. The Aquaducts of Xembor - outwards, across alternities (garrisonjames, Riskail)
10. The Lunar Gates / Lunar Mansions - also into dreamspace (garrisonjames, Riskail)
11. The Anagogue; The Whirlpool Gate - into Imperial space (John Till, Fate SF)
12. The Maelstrom - to one of eight places (garrisonjames, Hereticwerks & Porky)
13. The Dryad's Saddle - to another world (C'nor (Outermost_Toe), Lunching on Lamias)
14. ... 
15. The First and Last Die - to other realities (Porky)
16. The squishy cocoon - to dark and nasty regions (Porky)
17. Confirmation of the Higg's boson - one here to others (Porky)
18. The little helpers' dust - one here, maybe, to many others at once (Porky)

There's more inspiration at the original post and in the portal list, and if you need a spark for the world an open-ended portal might have as its destination, you could try this table.

Update: We've got so many in there now an alternative presentation may be needed.

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The beginning of the Ends

Here's an idea which was given a nudge by Trey's latest post, Opening the Doors of Perception. I recommend reading it, following the links and looking at the portal list.

The essence is this. All worlds are connected and each can be reached from any other. The idea is to get links between settings and game universes, so one campaign can run smoothly into another. What would a gateway to a given world look like?

Pick a world, any world - an existing space or a new - and describe a path across.

Here's a weird example: In a wild landscape, dig a cocoon in play dough, modelling putty or stained clay, then enter and settle in, buried alive. Fast, meditate and grow squishy like the squirming worms. Wake, and join their migration to dark and nasty regions.

Which could be a way you leave the current setting and end up somewhere like this...

A destination world could be much more serious of course, basically anywhere. I'll post more as I get them and make a master list, with links to whatever people come up with.

More inspiration.

Update: There's a master list here.

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Insanity Clause, Slip van Kringle and Old Farther C

Dear Me,

I have been a good boy this year, and for many years now in fact, despite these most difficult of circumstances. You know that as well as I do.

There is just the one present I would like. To go home, to the workshop, back to the old ways.

Here it is strange. Whatever they have in some of these places, they are not chimneys, and the air and gravity leave much to be desired too.

I have lost the last of our reindeer - our good, dashing runners! - and been compelled to leave the sleigh. It lies now overtaken by a drift, but not of any snow I have ever seen. I do my work out of the sack, as needs must, and you can imagine how that is. Indeed.

You tell those elves from me - no more experiments! No more of that funny dust. I did it the old way all those years, and the world in a day was a bracing ride. I should not have agreed. Well, the aches had multiplied... But it transpires instead that all of me has.

For I am not alone, that I now know. I recently met a furtive man whom I instantly took to be kin. He went by the jocular name of Slip van Kringle and spoke of having met one other on his travels, an Old Farther C. These suggestive monikers are not so different than mine of course - Insanity Clause - by which alias I make light of my predicament among so many strangers. This Slip chap was loathe to assume I was not simply one of our numerous grotto brethren; I trust on reflection that he was not; it seems I am many.

I am sundered, perhaps split, though not in mind - touch wood - or anything like wood - but in essence. I am cast like last year's must-have toy into the vast spaces of myth and legend, virtual auctions. Yes, for unseen presences act. As I gather it, these lands have a common thread, are lands my people and believers visited, made or imagined. 

Not all I would sanction with the workshop stamp that much I will say, but it on reflection it is conceivable I bear some responsibility. A change of direction may be in order...

So go to work my good man, and set those elves to it. Apologies - I have been unable to find either mince pies or brandy for quite some time now, but I have left instead this blue produce. It has restored in me some of the old 'ho ho ho' and you shall see why.

Yours intrinsically,

Me

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If you're wondering what's going on, this is the second 'Transpluristemic', a festive entry for a series of transferrable characters. This one is fairly obvious of course, so you don't need my suggestions, but if you're interested, the basics are below in the format I'll be using all the way, stat-free so you can build the characters up in any game system.

                                                                                                                              

     Insanity Clause, Slip van Kringle and Old Farther C, among others, are each...

• a stout superhuman artisan entrepreneur of great age and jolly demeanour,

• able to traverse shafts by a tap of the nose and to produce objects to order,

• possibly travelling in a vehicle powered by quadropedal ruminant mammals,

• likely to be found in the midst of exchanges, encouraging good behaviour.

                                                                                                                              

He's out there, but who knows how many he is exactly, and where in time and space...

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John Higginsbottom, the Intercosmic Man of Misery

Mr John Higginsbottom, 45, would very much like you to believe that he has pursued a number of highly unusual careers - as a decorated military commander, a small-town garden shed burner's assistant and even a half-starved scavenger in the tumbledown ruins of a backward civilisation.

He claims to be the victim of a cosmic joke, a claim which he readily admits will be difficult for readers of this blog to accept. It has, he says, turned his life upside down, or rather inside out.

His adventure, as he describes it, began with the activation of the latest CERN particle accelerator, a large literary experiment currently up and running below the ice of the Antarctic. The CERN project is a recurring feature of his bizarre experiences. It is, as he says in his slow, broken speech, "my nemesis".

It is also the anchor in the fantastical 20-year journey which he states quite calmly has seen him catapulted out of his ordinary life and across a range of alternative realities. Our reality is but one of these, and not an especially interesting one by all accounts.

That 'ordinary' life saw him born on Earth in the late 20th century, where by the time of his departure the principles governing plasmatic technology had yet to be discovered. Most bizarrely of all, humans in this strange world remained the dominant form of life.
 
The various cosmic stays are all of uniform duration: each begins as the accelerator is switched on and ends when a key event occurs. That event? Confirmation of the Higgs boson, that staple of children's literature, which he claims is a fundamental particle.

[Read more...]

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Stories are doors to other worlds so this guy could be pretty much anywhere now. If you want to use him, here's the core info, stat-free for building him up in any game system.

                                                                                                                              

     Mr John Higginsbottom, the self-styled 'Intercosmic Man of Misery', is...

• a creative and quick-witted muscular male human with an analytical mind,

• dangeous unarmed and adept in the use of fire and exotic ranged weaponry, 

• phlegmatic and likely to be found making enquiries on existential knowledge.

                                                                                                                              

The idea is basically just a development of the propluristemic rules, inspired mainly by the crossovers at Hereticwerks, which use mechanisms like the Synchronicitor. I can see it being a series with all kinds of transferrable characters lost in strange spaces.
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Owls and Pussycats from Beyond Space

The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money,
Wrapped up in a five pound note.

"The Owl and the Pussycat", Edward Lear                      

An attempt at developing that new idea from NetherWerks and C'nor, the Worldboat.

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From 3D to ?siD

I've been pondering the subject of psychic powers and magic. Here's an odd and possibly even horrifying look at how they might work.

To understand the idea we need to think about the differences between 2D and 3D. Imagine a 2D world, strung across the room you're now in and perfectly immaterial. Imagine tiny 2D lifeforms getting on with their lives inside, moving across the surface and around each other of course because they can't go over or under.

Now imagine you step up to that flat world and make contact with the very tip of your finger. What's that going to look like from their point of view? Maybe an area of their world fills with an alien material, and friends and colleagues vanish.

Keep pushing and as the finger widens from the tip, the area of destruction in their world widens, and more bystanders are lost. If the world isn't perfectly immaterial, some of those individuals might even get pushed out of their world, either on or in your finger. What would happen if you blew on the world? Or sneezed?

The scope of fiction

Something weirder than normal today, and absolutely enormous. To understand it best you probably need to have been following the posts here over the past few days. Because of this I recommend you at least skim these three before reading any further.

• Sensor range, on reconciling ghosts with hard sci-fi etc. and the soul with deep physics, plus what remains when measurable life signs end and a possible nature of information
• All ways?, a list of fictional portals which has grown massively, and is still growing - with no end in sight - thanks to the good readers of this blog
• Sizing up dimensions, an attempt to define 'dimension' in fiction

You might also want to look at the last card in yesterday's post. It gets to the point.

Done all that? Well, the bad news is no cartographer with experience of hyperdimensional manifolds came forward, so I had to make a start on the mapping myself. So here's my attempt at sketching the scope of fiction. It's only a sketch mind, a starting point for discussion, so be kind. The point is to show where the human imagination can and does roam, whether in cinema, comics, literature, gaming or any other sphere, including dreams, even in pseudo- and semi-pseudoscience. Everything.

Here's what I came up with.

All ways..?

A belated supplement for the post on portals. That post was set off by the domain-level project running at Hill Cantons and this one by The Angry Lurker mentioning Stargate. It's another list to inspire or help with research, as with the fictional mines and seventies films.

I've decided to include any method of instant or greatly accelerated travel through any or all of space, time, dimensions or universes. A major issue is classification of course. Alphabetical order is no real use, but we know there's little difference between high technology and magic, or science fiction and fantasy. So I've grouped them by general feel, but could it be better? And what else should be here?

Open doors

To access the new realm in the domain-level game being run at Hill Cantons you'll need to pass through a portal. Yes, one of those portals. Not sure how I feel about that, or rather how that feels.

If a portal offers instant passage to another location - possibly another world or even dimension in the polycosmos - what can we assume about it? We know we can pass through, but what about our clothing and equipment? Does it need to be in contact, and if so, with what exactly? Because those quivers and scabbards - or magazines and firearms - might not be touching skin. Do we take with us more than the air we carry in our lungs? Grubs in food of course, and a buzzing fly maybe, but a flagstone? Or floor?