Weird Worlds (part four)

The Switchboard

When the technocratic society of the Vendin-Conglomerates expanded rapidly and spilled out, off their home-sphere, their first act was to establish a vast communication network that would act as the bastion of their ever-growing revolution. It was the Vendin who first designed the crystal-sets which would resonate between realities, and who managed to reverse engineer the songs of dragons and angels to understand the frequency of different spheres. Before these marvellous breakthroughs, though, the daring engeniuses of the Conglomerates set out on an ambitious plan to link as many spheres as they could reach with a powerful wired network. Huge gate-towers still stand on several worlds as testament to this project, but somewhere adrift between these worlds lies the source of the great thick bands of cables that spill out of those towers: the Vendin Switchboard.
            When the Vendin-Conglomerates inevitably collapsed inwards, the Switchboard had been running on a skeleton staff for years: the technology and magic that powered it was long outdated, and it was considered by the engeniuses of the time to be impossible to update and improve. The fall of the Conglomerates forced the last few resident engeniuses to flee the Switchboard, leaving it as a flickering husk, out between the worlds.

	The Room	The Inhabitants	The Equipment
1	A huge room divided into many, many corridors between huge banks of cables and archaic circuitry. Dark and dusty.	The room is deathly silent except for the occasional whirring sound, followed by a gasp. Somewhere out of sight lies a half-clockwork man, dying at an excruciatingly slow pace and completely maddened by the process (9/6/1)	A massive, multi-powered portal cannon sits inert in this room, apparently partially dissected by looters. A misfiring and dangerous cable lies loose from it.
2	A low-ceilinged crawlspace full of detritus. The “roof” is a wrought iron grate through which a room can be seen above.	There is a constant pattering and ticking, generated by hundreds of tiny copper insects which click and whirr, always endeavouring to stay just out of sight of the players. They are ostensibly there to fix small faults in the cables, but for whatever reason they have swarmed this room (3/2/1 each)	A bank of consoles still occasionally flickers with lights and low “boops” alerting non-existent cable-jockeys to incoming transmissions that are more likely the space-bugs out in Nothingness chewing on the cables somewhere. Maybe they could be jury-rigged to send out some kind of communication?
3	A long, boxy room with shelves and shelves of machine parts and spools of cable. 1-in-6 chance that there is a still-barely-working version of any broken machine on the Switchboard somewhere in here.	An automaton is slowly working its way through the room, marking notes on a pad it carries as it goes. It will answer most questions the players pose to it, and apparently believes them to be engeniuses here on a survey. (8/20/1)	The various parts of an automaton are in a heap on the floor, right next to a casket that seems built to animate things of that very nature. If only it had a power-source…
4	A narrow set of corridors and cubicles, each with a dusty little console area of brass dials and switches.	A pair of grubby-looking human looters are here, trying to work out how best to transport spools of the valuable interplanar cable out of the Switchboard. (7/7/2)	A full and working set of engenius tools is laid out on a work-desk, including a spanner-staff and welding rifle plus several high-vibratory screwdrivers and a bag of wire-ties.
5	A long and low hall with plenty of decorative features and minimal Switchboard hardware. This must have been a reception area of some sort, because there are once-comfortable chairs dotted in the corners.	There’s a curious and immobile set of clockwork androids frozen in interaction with this room, who will activate if moved in any way. Their internal wind-up mechanism is extremely efficient and will power them back up if they are nudged in the slightest, letting them get back to the random busy-jobs they were attending to. (8/10/1)	A loose tangle of cables cascades from the ceiling, with a large and badly damaged portal-hole beneath. Nearby is one of the old portal control panels, which looks vaguely usable.
6	A tall cable-room, filled with great wrought-iron cages through which run thick lengths of cages from floor to ceiling. The cables disappear into strange devices that would once have acted as portals between the various spheres, but now are inert holes.	EITHER no animate entities inhabiting this room OR a clockwork facsimile of a dragon is coiled dangerously in the corner, depending on your own sensibilities- if, for example, the players have just managed to escape one dragon it would be fair to let them off of this one. The dragon is 16/36/4 and does damage as a real dragon, but cannot breathe fire. It is without a doubt the personal project of an engenius, crudely stashed here as an impromptu security measure.	Hefty, boxy switchboard units have been wheeled in here for storage, each one covered with cable-plugs and levers. One amongst them, barely distinguishable as different, controls the layout of the Switchboard (which itself acts as a huge circuit) and adds or subtracts rooms as required.

New Background: Old-World Engenius
Whether you’re merely emulating the old Vendin Engeniuses or you’re a bone-fide relic of that time somehow preserved or transported to the present is irrelevant: the fact is that you’re a dedicated problem solver and there are plenty of problems before you. Grab your spanner-staff and tighten up your adrenalin-valves, because the fun has just begun.

Possessions
- EITHER an archaic spanner-staff OR a repurposed welding-rifle (damage as fusil, but with a limited range)
- A thick, hardy apron and metalworking gauntlets (modest armour)
- A set of goggles that don’t serve any purpose other than emulating the vaguely steampunk aesthetic of the old Vendin ways.
- 1d6 spools of copper wire
- 1d6 Arcane Fuses

Skills
2 Metalworking
2 Engineering
2 Evaluate
1 Tool Fighting
2 Spell (Jolt)

Special
Using a combination of evaluation and engineering you can try to jury rig a wide range of objects into animation if you have a spool of copper wire and an arcane fuse handy. The less suited to mobility it is, the faster it decays back into an inert state. 

Weird Worlds (Part Three)

In part one I shared the Neverwoods, and then the Garden-Lands in part two. Now, onto Hellgaaz! 

Hellgaaz

One of the more recent hell-dimensions to spring into existence, Hellgaaz is a post-industrial nightmare, half-alive and half-inanimate and slowly spreading to eat up forgotten parts of other spheres.
            Hellgaaz is a favourite location to banish enemies to, since the local souls are made brutal by the place and the geography itself is unreasonable and untenable. Hellgaaz, as an ever-expanding place which exists somewhere between the real and the abstract, is infinite in its own way. To explore, generate rooms on the table below, varying size and shape as you please but keeping the same decayed-industrial aesthetic:

	This room is…	…with…	…and…
1	… a huge warehouse-interior, with a collapsing ceiling revealing dark orange skies…	… weird machinery protruding from the ceilings and/or walls, dangling wires and pipes which twitch and grab at those coming too close…	… 2d6 savage-punks, dressed in post-apocalyptic fashion and toting improvised weapons made of whatever they had to hand.
2	… a cramped set of steel-walkways, under which unseen things scuttle…	… a pit hidden beneath refuse which continues down into endless darkness, hot winds rising up from the depths…	… a great monster of tortured metal and broken tarmac, which slumbers fitfully and snarling as it dreams.
3	… a mess of rubble, unrecognisable after centuries of erosion…	…a grim heap of mangled machines and bodies, some of which moan feebly as you pass...	… an infestation of the thumb-sized biting flies which drone lazily overhead, until enough have massed to strike.
4	… a bare concrete pit, open to the hot winds above…	… a hideous and clunking boiler-tank fitted in the centre, filled with a tortured djinn which wails and begs for release…	… an unsteady floor, which could collapse at any moment into another room.
5	… a factory floor full of the collapsing means of production, slowly rusting all about the place…	… a ramshackle campsite, bearing the flags of one of the savage-punk tribes who stalk this hellhole…	… a wall which has crumbled out into the deserted wasteland of concrete and tarmac outside.
6	… a cracking and crumbling multi-storey car-park-like shell…	… a collapsing entrance into the goblin labyrinth, almost hidden behind heaps of detritus…	… 1d6 injured savage-punks, spiteful and wanting nothing more than to share their pain.

What terrible things are happening in Hellgaaz?

1.      You are here because abandoned places in an otherwise peaceful sphere are beginning to collapse into this hell, and there must be some way to stop it…

2.      Somewhere in the vastness of Hellgaaz is the palace of a fallen god, only theorised about in certain vile tomes… you intend to discover that place, and the foul intelligence behind Hellgaaz itself…

3.      You are here chasing down criminals who have been using this hellscape as a network between worlds.

4.      You are here because, in desperation, it is the last place you have access to for travelling between worlds… if you can get out again…

5.      You are here because someone told you there are innocent souls to be saved in Hellgaaz, and you cannot abide the thought of them, trapped here.

You are here because some of the Savage-Punks have been whispering about a warlord, one who intends to gather all the damned of Hellgaaz and lead them out, back into the many spheres…

Weird Worlds (Part Two)

To follow Part One, where we briefly visited the grim world of The Neverwoods, we’re dropping into the very different Garden-Lands. Now seems as good a time as any to clear up- these tables aren’t meant to be extensive or exhaustive, but more to be quick and flavourful jumping-in points. Ideally suited to an abrupt and unexpected visit to a weird different-world, but with the potential to spiral into something bigger with a little ingenuity and expansion by your group.

The Garden-Lands

A whole world of fenced off little areas of about 250 square meters, each growing a weird variety of produce and plants and managed by powerful and mysterious patrons from all over the multiverse.
            The Garden-Lands were once a curious expanse of flat, featureless soil which is unusually fertile. Powerful beings began to flock there, travelling to stake out their own allotment and begin growing whatever it is they really felt like. There’s an honour system in place that, rather surprisingly, means most of the beings there stick primarily to their own allotments and do not interfere in each other’s flowerbeds.

	The Owner	The Produce	The Features
1	… is an absent-minded but ancient wizard, a master of most if not all arcane arts who has essentially transcended mortality.	… is an exceptional variety of fruit and vegetables, with 2d6 recognisable varieties and an additional 3d6x10 exotic kinds. Closer inspection will reveal it is one huge, fleshy plant which grows all of them.	… are beautiful topiary and carefully trimmed leaves, with meticulous attention to detail. Heaven forbid you should put anything out of place.
2	… is an incredibly powerful lich who has long since conquered his home-sphere	… is a small orchard growing golden varieties of many fruits- apples, pears, peaches and oranges.	… are unruly plants and messy footways, with no care taken to really organise where things are growing.
3	… is a demigod of some quality or other who tires of his otherwise two-dimensional existence and spends an increasing amount of time “away from it all”.	… is an extensive range of flowers, a few varieties of which can speak and hold intelligent conversation.	… are unusual creatures and strange little critters. All manner of alien beasts could be hiding under that hedgerow.
4	… is an extradimensional being who still finds absurd novelty in the most mundane of manual labour.	… is a range of animate plants including mounds that shamble and ivy that strangles, and a particularly characterful hydra-bush (Hydra-angea?)	… are curious little structures- a carefully constructed greenhouse or shed, possibly holding a portal to the owner’s home sphere.
5	… is an ancient god thought dead in his own mythos, largely to escape the prayers of whatever petitioners remain for him.	… is a set of holes containing little potato-goblins which will shove, fight and bite to be left in their holes.	… are bizarre statues and standing stones, placed tastefully about the allotment.
6	… is a wise arch-druid who has turned from protecting the wilderness to cultivating his own little patch of plants.	… is whatever has taken hold, since no effort to coordinate has been made. Roll again for the four nearest allotments and assume some mix of these things has spilled into this one.	… are inventive uses of water-distribution systems. A tranquil pond graces the centre.

Some possible story-hooks here in the idyllic allotment-Sphere:

What was it that drew you into a brief stint of fence-hopping?

1.      You came to find an expert organimancer who may be able to identify or heal a rare plant specimen.

2.      You have been employed to find a rare fruit for a rich noble’s banquet-hall.

3.      You need desperately to find an old and weary god, to convince him to come home and curb his wicked son.

4.      You have been hired by a wizard with an allotment to defend it from garden-hopping fruit-thieves.

5.      You have been hired by an allotment owner to clear out the thorough infestation of gremlins and goblins which is ruining his courgette-patch.

6.      You have accidentally slipped into this world when a teleportation went wrong, landing on a prize crop. Now that crop’s owner is chasing you murderously through the other gardens as you seek a way off the sphere.

Weird Worlds (Part One)

The Neverwoods

Visitors to the Neverwoods are rarely there on purpose, but the Sphere has a way of drawing in the lost and unwary. Many a dense thicket acts as an accidental portal to this twisted place.
            This world is thick forest all-around, except for where the villages and manors break the foliage. Magical barriers generated by the world’s ever-present ward-stones, weird rune marked rocks that keep the chaos of the forest at bay: for it is more than the threat of wilderness that stalks the perimeters these stones mark out.
            The Neverwoods do not obey the usual rules of space. Once out in the un-warded areas, distance is molten and mutable and time is as fragmentary and fickle as the weather- it is impossible to wander from the few carefully warded paths without becoming hopelessly lost and quickly maddened. The only souls who tread freely between the trees are the Witches, men and women who have submitted to the madness out there and gained twisted powers as a result.

	The Village Peasants	The Manor-Nobles	The Woods Around
1	… are a weak and miserable bunch, terrified of the world outside of their ward-stones and totally subservient to the ruling class.	… are decadent maniacs, dressed in ornate animal masks. They have a penchant for the dramatic, and love to see the reactions of those nearest their victims.	… have an unusual number of Witches who walk amongst the peasants and consort with the nobility.
2	… are obsessed with a backwards and puritanical religion, regularly burning “witches” to keep the Woods-Gods at bay. Xenophobic and accepting of their roles beneath the nobles.	… are gluttonous brutes, prone to cannibalism and gruesome culinary displays. They keep great and ghastly hounds which are beaten and starved into peak viciousness.	… have a barrow of the dead nearby which periodically rise, drawn to the rare light of the living and the stability created by the ward-stones.
3	… are scheming and paranoid, split into many cells of revolutionaries who talk empty talk of overthrowing the nobles.	… are perverse schemers, prim and proper in dress and manner but driven by unspeakable and insatiable urges. Their wickedest members are academics of the blackest arts, fascinated by the science of cruelty.	… have a faulty ward-stone, leading to a confusing and disturbing effect on the villages perimeter, where ghosts and illusions pace freely amongst the trees.
4	… are broken mentally and physically by their constant toiling, with barely a reaction, let alone word, for the worst horrors and surprises in their world.	… are violent, drunken louts with little in the way of civility except perhaps an exquisite wardrobe of breeches, ever stocked to replace those freshly-soiled.	… have a group of rogue peasants camped just barely within reach of a ward-stone, armed and out for blood as they prowl about as highwaymen.
5	… are kept cheery and bright by the sing-song promises of a pastor who has erected a humble church in the square and has a sinister manner when left alone with the vulnerable…	… are a long and inbred line of wicked necromancers, morbidly drawn to the dead time and time again and with little if any love for the living.	… have been claimed as the hunting grounds for a huge, demonic bear.
6	… are sinister and cruel, having been moulded by their surroundings. Still powerless to stop the nobles, they unleash their bitterness on any weaker targets they find.	… are seemingly genteel souls, seeming fair and kind on first impression though each and every one holds a private darkness in their heart. Their keeping-up of appearances only serves to salt the wounds of those they inevitably damage irrevocably in pursuit of these “little guilty pleasures”.	…have a particularly ancient and powerful Witch living in them, who causes untold heartache for peasants and nobles alike.

Why would you come to this dreadful place?

1.       You seek information, and only the parun of a particular noble family can give it to you.

2.       You need a curse breaking, and only one of the wild and ancient witches of the Neverwoods can do the job.

3.       You misunderstood how fundamental suffering is to this place, and came hoping to change things for the better.

4.      You came to study the ward-stones, and work out how lumps of rune-scarred rock can impose a kind of reality on this chaos.

5.      You have been tricked here, by an ill-reputed sorcerer who wished you nothing but ill.

6.      You have been hired to broker a deal with a family of nobles… little do you know, it’s for a human trafficker.

For the Love of Language

The Spheres, the worlds, they are islands of materia amongst the immaterial. There is much more of nothing than something, out there in the vastness of existence. When the mortal sorcerers summon forth the forces of the void, they are prone to invoking the names of fringe gods who rest on the horizon between Real and Unreal things and calling out to the great abstract entities of worldly forces which drift (un)bodily through the maddening whirls between worlds.

But there are other forces which haunt the spaces between the Spheres, more pervasive and perhaps more dangerous. Language is a living thing, with a life cycle drawn as on planes and dimensions beyond our comprehension. Languages are strange creatures, if creatures they can even be called, which descend into the crude matter of our worlds to procreate and allow the linear time that exists in the Real to shape them somewhat, before they ascend again into the Unreal, the space outside of time, and give back what they have developed to their whole.

The Tongue-Tamer mages of the Carrikhan Islands believe all languages are one language, repeatedly coming back time and time again to the Spheres of Existence and disseminating itself from different vectors. The Tongue-Tamers study language exhaustively, hoping to find a few keystone phrases which will help them truly understand the divine being that is Language.

There are heretic Tongue-Tamers who claim Language is a genus, and that each individual spoken language is a separate entity out in the Unreal: these Tongue-Tamers invariably champion one specific Language at the expense of all others, treating it as a kind of patron which will grant them boons in return for loyal service in the quest for its evolution and elevation. Such Tongue-Tamers were employed by the Graze Imperials, during their quest to stomp out the ugly indigenous languages of the other islands. 

There are all manner of ordinances in the wizards libraries of Irifice concerning the correct way to communicate with Language/s, mostly wheeling and wondering around the inherent paradoxes of talking to creatures in a manner which those creatures are made of. Common consensus tends towards the metaphor of communicating with a man through body parts, and a strict warning that trying to comprehend the motives or even the passing thoughts of Language/s will blast apart the feeble reasoning capabilities of a mortal mind by completely eroding the operational context of an actual, physical universe. A conversation with a Language is a many-layered rabbit hole of metaphor and allegory, quickly losing any concrete foundation for the casual listener.

New Background: Tongue Tamer
The Tongue-Tamer Mages work endlessly to understand the true form of the formless, unlocking myriad mysteries within the linguistics of the otherworldly. In theory the Tongue-Tamers are masters of wordplay and wit, but in practice they tend to be poor communicators with outsiders too their order- it turns out that communicating entirely in a kind of multidimensional double-speak while you're at work can bleed out a little into your social life. Who knew.
Possessions- A set of woolly and uncomfortable robes, stitched full of your favourite words and sentences.
- 1d3 phrase-tomes of exotic languages

- A reading-sceptor, replete with oversized viewing lens on the top

Skills
4 Languages

2 Random Spell
2 Random Spell

2 Astrology
2 Second Sight

Special
You can use your deep and thorough understanding of Languages vectors through this world to tweak it's track for a short time. Use your Languages skill to change the meaning of one word for 1d6 hours. Since you do technically live in an existence formed solely of language this can on occasion affect the physical. 

Travel between Settings

There are infinite Planes and Spheres in the multiverse, all possibilities caught and bubbled from the roiling chaos of everything else. They are the rafts of pattern amidst Everything. They are the worlds on which stories are told.

Spheres are stories. When a character leaves the world they are from, they sign away their rights to that tale. For most, it isn't a bad deal: the majority of stories for natives involve working a long, hard life only to retire and die. The majority of roles are walk-on features. Some people have sacrificed their parts in grand and incredible dramas to see what else was out there. Many such people are sorely disappointed.

Parallel worlds exist, but you'll struggle to see them: when viewed from a cosmic scale, worlds that are similar up to a point of historical divergence tend to look the same. Their "wavelengths" collapse into one another, manifesting as a single world in the material sense. The parallel worlds are there, still, but the only sure way to reach one is the long way around: go back to the divergence and do things differently.

Travel between the worlds is often accidental. There are endless soft-spots and fuzzy borders, where there aren't enough living souls to pin the usual laws of reality in place. There are deserts of glass shards that join up reflections, from just out of view of the mirror. There is woodland so dense that when you get to the heart of a thicket, a full rotation on the spot has more than three hundred and sixty degrees in it, more than four cardinal directions to walk in. There are doors which open to the wrong world when the weather is a little queer.

Travel between worlds on purpose is often confusing. Time doesn't play well with different continuities, as though it struggles to keep so many things in mind at once. Golden Barges are a popular method of travel, but every culture builds them differently (and each is insistent that theirs is the "normal" kind). The one thing they have in common is a weird non-relation between their internal and external dimensions. Roll three times on the table below with a d3 and d6 to generate one on the fly.

	The Engine…	The Appearance…	The Quirk…
11	Probability-Smasher	Great Golden Ship with glass bubbles	Impossible for sphere-native souls to look directly at
12	Auto-Cartographic Realizer	Enormous rectangle of metal, featureless but for a door	Sings to sooth itself on long journeys or periods alone
13	Revelation Drive	Folding silver yacht, only visible from certain angles	The intelligence that is the engine’s functionality is evil
14	Plasmic-Separator	Great brassy bullet with submarine port-holes	The intelligence that is the engine’s functionality is a sop
15	Discordant Thought Engine	A perfect sphere with freakishly ideal dimensions	Has a long list of things that the engine may require to work
16	Spatial Re-Philosophizer	Rusty, battered, and extremely unflattering design	Has “favourite worlds” it will try to revisit
21	Recurrence Loop	Long, sharp and thin, with an array of antennae	Smells foul and makes any land it lands on infertile
22	Quantity-Qualifier	Blocky and bulky, with many added shapes welded on	Has an interfering spirit trapped in the interface-system
23	Fractal Surfing-Hull	Glittering and iridescent, like an inverted oyster	Can only travel to planes and spheres of a certain kind
24	Chaos Ingestion	Like a classic Galleon, but with a weird metal shell-top	Has the potential to explode if left inert for too long
25	Parallel Chronovore	Organic golden shape, like a grown boat	Will vanish into its own paradox forever if left unobserved
26	Elysian Reality-Wurm	Tree-like, but sticky with black ichor	Is actually a proto-sphere of its own, waiting to grow bigger
31	Profound Disconnection Engine	Dagger-shaped, with landing gear as its hilt	"Plays up to look cool" when there are other interdimensional ships near
32	Platonic Equator	Something like a helicopter and a solarium at once	Prone to tearing open chaos-dimension portals when the engine goes wrong
33	Satrian Crab-Power	Huge and gloriously steampunk	Is almost always coveted by intelligent beings throughout the multiverse
34	Hallucinogenic Reality-Broker	Impossibly dark and squat, with bat-wings	Is almost always feared by unintelligent beings throughout the multiverse
35	Aneristic De-Entropifier	A great flapping ray-shape, always hovering off ground	Generally erodes the quality of reality in places it has spent too long
36	Possibility Combuster	A hellish machine of chimneys and fire-grates	Has some bizarre set of creatures living on-board, always just out of sight

There are places where the Planes and Spheres naturally intersect, cities and monuments that are interplanar by their very nature. There are also places that just plain don't believe in other worlds.

Magic from one world may just not work on another. If you visit the same place by two different means, you may end up in two different places. If you find a way home, it won't really be the same place.