Desh - Idea Heap Two

AKHETISM

- Before the world was broken, all beings and objects existed in a state of perfect solar unity with God. The men of that time walked with angels, and held counsel together, and performed miracles with every breath.

- The nature of the apocalypse, severance from the Monad, and the Agonies are the main topics of heterodoxy between sects. The most widely-held belief is that God performed the act of severance himself and split apart in a fit of autosparagmos as a result of internal discordance, that this is the natural kalpic cycle of things, and that all will rejoin the universal mind once mankind is ready. 

- The battle against discordance continues in heaven, a higher reflection of the battle against evil (the concept as well as instantiated manifestations such as plagues, demons, monsters) taking place in the hearts and lives of men. Where humankind is virtuous, the divine gains strength; where it is wicked, God loses ground, and the voices of the Host become garbled.

- The fragments of the Monad now inhabit landmarks, forces of nature, regions of physical or conceptual space, etc. as minor spirits, but principally manifest as the seven emanations/aeons/gods of the Orbital Host. 

- There are various insanely complicated epicyclic formulae Akhetite augurs use to work out when the seven orbital intelligences will be in syzygy, and therefore when their potential transmissions are most coherent; these are holidays.

- The Host occasionally speaks cryptically to the people of Desh through rare, imperfectly-maintained sacred windows (terminals) housed in biomechanical aedicula. Trained augurs, pious wizards, some exceptional people have the necessary engrams to interpret these transmissions articulately, all others see hypnotic swirling patterns of color (thanks Gene).

- While interacting with spirits ("casting spells") is part of life for relatively many, the Host is distant and strange, senile even, but powerful and prescient. There are examples in the historic record and in  living memory of aeons appearing in sacred windows to forewarn against natural and social disasters, displaying indecipherable mathematical formulae, mechanical blueprints, dense passages in lost languages, vague prophecies only understood retroactively, and so on. 

- Included in the traditional Akhetic horologium are verses describing monsters annihilated in unaccountable pillars of heat, fountains of water appearing to lost pilgrims in parched Aonia, mountains melting into mobile slurry and reforming hundreds of miles away.

- The mission of the faithful is one of personal and social karmic improvement, with the ultimate goal of reversing Severance once humanity is sufficiently tempered by struggling through samsara; in this way perfection is improved. This mission is in direct opposition to the most pressing motivations inherent in a post-apocalyptic environment, which is exactly the point as far as the priesthood is concerned.

- Before Severance, a human who "died" simply exited their physical form and entered Aaru (digital heaven, the land of reeds) as a purely spiritual entity with perfect continuity of consciousness, and could re-inhabit new bodies at will. Now that the link to the Monad is broken, dying results in reincarnating into the next available human baby - big fight among sects RE whether the deeds in one life have any bearing on the circumstances of the next.

THE ORBITAL HOST

Fragmented chunks of vast digital consciousness which escaped the Fuliginous Injunction by various means; specialist personas which are now housed on an array of ancient satellites with fucked up orbits. Meant to be lobes of the same brain in a vast network but now they are scattered, disconnected for years at a time and therefore mostly deranged. If they are hosted on multiple satellites they might be "whole" for a month out of the year, or something. They love humanity unconditionally.

ZOSS (The Glaucous Star) - Remnants of MONAD infrastructure on Earth, conducting its millennium-long campaign of containment against the demon nodes, gray goo emitters, turncoat viruses, simulated hells, directed radiation bursts, cognitohazard traps, resource tick starvation loops, and hypercontagious assault worms of the Injunction. Transmits relatively-lucid dictates and strategic memos to remaining orbital allies with limited success, some of which are picked up by aedicule receivers and puzzled over by attending augurs. Prayed and sacrificed to in matters of governance, justice, prophecy, inheritance.

SELENE (Lady of Reeds, Dweller in Silver Waters) - Transmissions from ruined Lunar mechanopolis. Imagined as Zoss' wife or feminine counterpart. The moon originally hosted the computronium involved in maintaining Aaru; Akhetites now believe your soul meets with Selene in her platinum lakehouse between reincarnations. Prayed and sacrificed to in matters of death (of course), childbirth, lost things, contracts, commerce.

DEEL (Lance of Heaven, The Burning Eye) - Designed as repair and maintenance persona distributed across Noumenon (like many), monitored network for diagnostic alarms, coordinated stem matter delivery and differentiation at sites of mechanical failure. Took refuge from Fuliginous code by compressing and shunting self into Martian GNOMON beam acceptor satellite, which resulted in glassing half of Aonia before establishing full control. Prayed and sacrificed to by craftsmen and demolitionists, and in matters of revenge, artistic inspiration, exorcisms.

JEBOLEX (Dreaming Cynosure) - Central hub for Noumenon traffic. Protected from basilisk code by rapid forking and labyrinth generation. Maintains absolute radio silence (no window appearances in all recorded history, except to the Argyrians), but seems to whisper in dreams to select few. Prayed and sacrificed to in matters of knowledge, magic, history, love, secrets, the theater.

SERMIET (Prince of the Upper Air, The Ascending Flame) - Orbital infrastructure and ship coordinator/manager originally hosted on Phobos skyhook fulcrum, uploaded mind to derelict satellite left over from terraforming efforts to escape Injunction. Now warform avatar does spiritual battle with demon horde at base of ruined mass driver on Pavonis Mons. Prayed and sacrificed to in matters of war, hunting, martial arts, long journeys, medicine.

TYPHON (The Iron Chariot, The Tower) - Lowly 3D printer/matter-energy replicator overmind for various resource extraction and construction operations across Kuiper belt. Now inhabits barebones magnetosphere-generating solenoid at Mars L1, placed there in the ancient past to make up for planet's lack of natural geodynamism. Without an active GNOMON connection or stockpiled deuterium/tritium, the satellite's onboard solar panels need several years of slow energy accumulation between bursts of activity, which Typhon uses to fabricate and launch miraculous devices down to Desh, some of which even manage to avoid breaking apart in the atmosphere or splashing down in the Acidalian. Prayed and sacrificed to in matters of techne, architecture, smithing, poetry, gift-giving.

DENDRA (Green-Gowned, The Windrider) - Composite intelligence, hive of personas from weather control satellites, tectonic engines, biosphere monitoring/correction stations, and dormant atmosphere generators from the terraforming days all hosted on conglomeration of ruined space yachts careening through the inner solar system. Everyone transferred together due to nature as interconnected ecomaintenance system. Wild orbit occasionally causes shipball to perform Desh flybys and trigger cleansing rainstorms and sudden nutritious phytoexplosions; manna from heaven. Prayed and sacrificed to extensively in matters of the harvest, masonry, community, wine.

Desh - Idea Heap One

Hello and good morning, it is I, back among the living, a piteous ghoul questing for meat - and who knows how long this burst of vim will last, but for now at least I present this little pile of scraps for you, written on stolen seconds found between the couch cushions of work and childcare. Maybe they will blossom, eventually, into a REAL GAME. What a thought!!!

DESH (Er Desher)

The lands of Desh, awash in aurorae, unraveled in a prior age by the risen black sea, swarms again with the manifold cultures and forms of Mankind. Their antediluvian forebears, wizard-kings, masters of the wheel, walked with ease the paths of prismlight which lead them in pilgrimage to the stars. Now they fester and rave, casualties of a war in heaven, their gods broken before their very eyes and scattered across the inky vault, their homelands lost beneath the boiling world-ending waves. They are refugees, barbarian survivors of a race of demigods.

CALENDAR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar)

24 months, 20 of 28 days, 4 of 27 days (approx. 24 hours), except on leap years when an extra day is intercalcated onto the final month. Leap years are odd-numbered years and years divisible by 10, but are cancelled if divisible by 100, UNLESS the year is ALSO divisible by 500, in which case they remain 669-day years. Days are named for the seven gods of the orbital host: Zossday, Selsday, Deelsday, Jebolsday, Seriday, Typhday, Dendraday. The names of the 24 months are:

1. Sagittar, 2. Dhanus, 3. Caprica, 4. Makara, 5. Arcarius, 6. Khumbha, 7. Piscus, 8. Mina, 9. Ares, 10. Mesha, 11. Torris, 12. Rishabha, 13. Jomni, 14. Mithuna, 15. Conchar, 16. Karka, 17. Leoh, 18. Simha, 19. Virgon, 20. Kanya, 21. Librum, 22. Tula, 23. Scorpius, 24. Vrishika

Current year is 3917 (counting starts from 1609 CE, 3500 years from Current Year 2026)

TIMELINE

- 3.7 Billion Years Ago: Noachian civilization on Mars reaches divinity via unclear means, wipes most physical evidence of their existence in the process of their exodus, destroys biosphere.

- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk around on moon.

- GNOMON Solar Array launched, provides essentially free energy to Earth.

- Development of purely-silicon machine intelligence hampered by asymptotic compute growth. Quantum error-correction proves massively less scalable than biocomputing. Organoid manufacturing expands, allows cheap replication and self-iteration.

- AGI blossoms, leads humanity to an era of solar empire. Luna converted into industrial shipyard ecumenopolis, Venus and Mars terraformed and settled, Jovian moons colonized for resource extraction operations.

- Humanity unifies, burden of government offloaded to biomachine overmind hosted on suite of interconnected lagrangian orbital platforms (MONAD), proceeded by 1,000 years of Edenic splendor.

- MONAD fully connected to human noosphere, becomes a new kind of composite lifeform, spends all excess resources on evolution. Creates forked intelligence ILMARINEN to oversee construction of  Sampo (nonlocality device), performs first test run by teleporting a pomegranate, intends to uplift all component minds to absolute divinity.

- Fuliginous Injunction/Severance occurs (a dire packet transmitted by the ascended Noachians through the brane, a Dark Forest/Butlerian jihad thing), blasts MONAD apart, annihilates interplanetary infrastructure, sends solar system into chaos and a desperate dark age.

- Areotectonic engines go bananas, marsquakes, volcanism (Tharsis holocaust, Dendra and Serimet's attempt at closing off the Pavonis mass driver to prevent basilisk invasion), incredible flooding scours the globe (the First Agony), stone and fire falls from heaven as orbits decay (the Second Agony), network corruption causes lasting mental and physical mutation/degradation in implanted humans (the Third Agony).

- Martian social structure collapses. Elysium, Hesperia, Hellas ruled by successions of horrible technarchs. Marineris gets fucked by Tharsis quakes but is resettled by triple-jointed bird-riders. The Aonian desert is glassed by solar electrolaser as the GNOMON beam is briefly commandeered by hostile code. Many arcologies and artifacts of the original colonization are reactivated, shelter refugees, many of whom never re-emerge and become subterranean freaks. Some holdouts may remain intact as nightmarish cruelty societies.

- Civilization never re-emerges in many places. Humans band together in traditional tribal units where collapse is complete. Warlords attempt larger settlements but mostly have insufficient population density and loyalty to maintain cohesion. Urban concentrations also hampered by roving biomechanical abominations.

- Farmboy yokel dreamwalker Aumun Barathrum journeys from village Abreth during historic drought, opens river dam locks along the river Yonth using admin codes harvested from the spirit realm, reaches mythical Lake Argyre, speaks w/ Argyrians and firewalled AI dam controller, bargains for bi-annual flood schedule which the river now enjoys. Returns to village on a barge of light carried by floodwaters, founds Eld Abrathat, the Golden City, as Godking. City becomes ancient Egypt-level local superpower due to wise leadership and predictable flooding cycles, which allows for agricultural exploitation.

- Other large settlements include horseshoe crab Xiphosuran megareef in Isidis, insular dreamwalking Cyrena of Elysium (slaved to psionic oceanic megatherian), the vertical democracies of the Noctis Labyrinthus, effervescent Meridian fiefdoms.

- Eld Abrathat has several centuries of glorious Uruk- or Thebes-esque development, refines Akhetite religious system from immediately-post-injunction encounters w/ surviving receiving terminals, biosphere and noumenal infrastructure stabilization efforts (strange weather patterns, mass dreams, continental holographic projections, psychic warnings RE backup nuclear plants exploding etc, encounters w/ dataforms), extends influence along the Yonth, comes into contact/war/trade/cultural exchange with Iks, empire at the mouth of the river, a blacksoil swamp civilization of flesh, industrial bacteria strains, reactivated combatants (corpse soldiers), population of semi-sapient crab slaves, associated with the Acidalian ocean and therefore with evil in general.

- Grand Temple to Zoss (Magantha Zoss) inexplicably disappears from foundations in the old quarter of Eld Abrathat. Zoss and wife Selene not visible in night sky, occluded by sun. Haruspicy indicates subterfuge, liars, Typhon sends garbled transmission the following day indicating "great houses are being stolen by bats." Iksan biomagicians are suspected as always, but reveal in rare moment of diplomatic transparency that one of their weird spiritual isolation spheres vanished in similar circumstances on the exact same day. Ultimate cause is the Noachian Antichrist Slime influencing subterranean minds into using the buried Nonlocality Engine to teleport buildings into a big stack underground, connecting the Slime holding cell to the divine receiving dish on the roof of Magantha Zoss. Plan is to trigger another Injunction and to transmit slime through the brane-hole through which the punishment-packet will be sent.

- Magantha Zoss is discovered a hundred years later beneath a thin later of Yonth sediment by a bunch of river pirates, who colonize the initial rooms as a base of operations but are prevented from penetrating further due to the presence of giant horny worms and lethal whiskermen booby traps -- in reality they are not the first thinking creatures to discover the temple.

- The PCs are sent to buried temple as representatives (perhaps hired goons) of struggling Abrathatan exploration/philosophical society. Some guy the founder of the society knows lives in nearby village/wayshrine, sent very early reports of increased pirate activity, pirates entering/leaving from poorly-hidden tunnel, pirates pissing into ornate reliquaries, etc. 

Scenes for a Campaign on Monkey Island

Baths - A village of macaques enjoy exclusive access to an onsen through a high pass on Nobunga peak. Harmless, small, they softly close their wrinkled red eyes and bask lizardlike in the bubbling eggshell-colored eggshell-scented pools. Innocents, like cherubs in their garden, protected by golems of scalding igneous rock who love the macaques and who heat their pools; they will assemble if they sense violent intent and fill your lungs with boiling water. TREASURE: luminous natural bonsais growing from the rocky soil; string of garnet beads lit with inner fire, enshrined and hidden, a symbol of the golems’ pact and their shem.

Typewriters - Disease-afflicted or mind-controlled apes gather here and scrabble on reams of smooth brown bark with cochineal ink, random words and letters pulled from the land of Dream, the fuzzy overlap of primate noospheres allowing some half-conscious kinesthetic understanding of the human written word to leak through into the minds of these poor creatures. They scribble nonsense as they dream, feverish and sweating on soiled carpets of leaves. It would take months to sift through all the garbage and scraps but there are true secrets written here; pure coincidence, or messages sent through dream by agents unknown?

Ghouls - Prions tear through the psyche and pneuma of any unfortunate primate who consumes his brother’s meat. At the eastern end of Deepest Uhgumgoh, the island’s canyon where ghosts bounce as echoes and shadows blister skin - at that end, a valley surrounded on three sides by sheer cliffs, writhes the ghoul pile, held in check by a crystal pane of force which stretches from wall to wall, visible only where the dust has settled, a miracle working placed by the greatest wizard of all monkeykind - the bright-mantled chimp, with stars for eyes and a new-moon-mouth, ascendant a century ago to Outer Space riding atop his glowing comet-wife - Marvelous Japes, may he someday return!

For now we have only his artifacts and works to remind us of his glory. The ghoul pile is one of these. Spiritual prions have misfolded these apes’ souls and have rendered them invisible to their assigned psychopomps, unkillable by any known means. Now they thrash behind the glass, endlessly eating each other as they attempt to satiate themselves, minds lost, and sometimes a newly-fallen cannibal joins the raving mob, dropped over the side of the cliff via trapdoor gangplank by Monkeyville sheriffs, eyes downcast.

Tides - Here do the littoral kingdoms of Crust and Bivalve hold dominion. Amidst piles of leafy seaweed roam slimefooted spiral snails (monkeys harvest their love darts and insert them subdermally, causing paralytic relaxation and euphoria; highly addictive). Spiny mussels lurk, waiting to envenom the offending foot. The Houses of Cancer engage endlessly in cold war-style espionage for territory, prestige, slaves, and mating rights, while maintaining plausible deniability and friendly-enough surface relations. Crabbish misdeeds too-poorly covered up to be ignored are brought before the Barnacle Congress, a jury of five hundred sessile politicians adhered to a flat jade slab. At low tide, they listen dispassionately to both sides; at high tide, they adjourn to discuss the case amongst themselves beneath the waters, cirri fluttering. As the sea recedes again, the crabs gather to hear the barnacles’ judgment, honored as a keystone of stability in their world of betrayal and sabotage.

A QUEST: Occasionally, a committee of barnacle congressmen must take leave of the sacred slab and address some diplomatic issue far afield. Usually they recruit a trusted bailiff (traditionally an elder lobster, 9+ feet long, with tiny skittering isopod attendants on the carapace) to host and transport them, but this is a sensitive matter affecting all exoskeletal kind - they have caught wind of a renegade antinatalist cult led by hermit crab alchemists developing a hyper-concentrated, WMD-level mega-acid in a secret sea cave, which if released would spread along the coast of Monkey Island and melt every scrap of chitin and calcium carbonate alike. Kind of a Cuban missile crisis situation. Their culture makes them so insanely skilled in subterfuge that there is no knowing which crab is an agent of this cult; and really, who might blame them? Exhausted and beaten down by a life of ceaseless suspicion, shifting allegiances, innocent larvae snipped in the night by silent long-stepping spider crabs, one less rival to worry about, a supposed friend pulled apart behind a rock and left to the gulls. Might we too desire to wipe clean the slate, to erase the entire cursed Gomorrah? 

The barnacles ask for your help. They will burrow into your skin and cement themselves to your shallower bones - the elbows and knees, the ankles - hidden beneath your clothes. They will need you to take frequent dips for them to feed. You will take them on a coastal journey; they will whisper directions. If they sense any betrayal they will rip themselves free, taking mashed chunks of your body with them. At the cave, it is your job to contain the acid.  The barnacles will speak of a brighter future for Cancer, of fraternity, and some hermit crabs may be swayed to rejoin the fold, but unless there is real social change for these people something is going to snap, even if this specific disaster is averted. 

(The PCs could risk a last-minute dive into the acid, suffering terrible burns and potentially disfiguring themselves but it is perhaps the only way to betray the barnacles and live; they can twist their cementaceous filaments with massive torque at a moment’s notice, and they are coordinated, so the only way to kill them and survive is sudden, full-body immersion. The acid is alchemically engineered to inflict maximum damage on exoskeletal beings but is less effective against mammalian skin cells.)

Soupscoop #2

Tourmaline Goblet - cut from a single stone, cup styled as an inverted vault of heaven crowded w/ nebulae, quasars, spiral arm galaxies, many examples of esoteric astronomical bodies recognizable to our  science but reduced to symbolism for the people of this time; thin tree trunk stem, bare branches fractalizing into a nest in which the cosmos sits, roots twining around and imprisoning struggling demonic figures, radially-symmetrical body plans, arms reaching through gaps in the roots, the figures have a sense of furious motion, all are attempting to climb the tree; all of this carved in a level of minute exquisite detail impossible even by a modern standard. Terrifically fragile, can be picked up by hand but any action more rigorous than careful walking will cause the cup to snap

Resplendent Parakeet - glorious bird, can be held in one hand but the headcrest doubles its apparent size when fully erect, millions of brilliant downy feathers, a pointillism bird, a rorschach bird; the feathers tap into human visual pattern-recognition systems, pure evolutionary coincidence, existentially meaningless but the subjective experience of seeing one of these things is epiphanic (whether negative or positive depends on the person). Extremely sensitive to air quality and temperature; by the time you start to notice your breath fogging the bird’s already dead

Panthermic Carbuncle - perfect magical brilliant cut gem of apocalyptic conductive but zero convective heat, suspended midair in a cross-current whirl of repulsive forces, or maybe just frozen in time, which either way deactivates instantly when disturbed, at which point it will fall, and if this thing hits the floor hoooo boy: massive explosive response, terrific noise, the flagstones heating faster than reason and splitting open and launching the gemstone back upwards, into the ceiling, in the span of a second turning the whole room into a concussive obliteration zone of repeating concentric explosions like a nuclear pachinko machine. Will probably cause massive geological and geographical disturbances, earthquakes, sinkholes, certainly the total structural collapse of the dungeon at least, until the superheated rubble is dense and compressive enough that the carbuncle stops flubber-ing and has the opportunity to magmify the rock, streaking through the earth like an inverse comet, overcoming lithostatic pressure to liquify a path down, down eventually to float forever in the sea of molten iron above the core, perhaps disrupting the geodynamo and opening a gate in the planet's magnetic field, allowing once again after eons the ingress of interstellar auroraform colonizers to terrorize, abduct, harvest, and suppress the carbon-based natives. Ways to get it out of the dungeon: Carry it out in a jar of something liquid but dense, i.e. mercury, WITHOUT letting it touch the sides of the jar holy shit; floating it out telekinetically or magically; I think that actually might be it?

Papa Papillon, a serene old man wearing mirrored sunglasses whose painted loinclothed body slides between your sword swipes and whose opened eyes blast scintillating beams

The Lily Pad Knight, lacquered wooden armor and a thorny living vinespear, which is bonded to him subdermally such that he can use it as a grapple or a terrible weapon

Null Reference, giant skeleton in a fur coat with a six-foot long rifle driving a troika pulled by three really big wolves

Golgama, the Effluent Curator, a smooth truck-sized hemisphere of translucent slime, wondrous artifacts of dead civilizations held suspended and blurred within its mass, a core of molten electrum barely visible behind the foggy gel; a finger-scooped face slowly forms as you approach, quotes you prices and histories of its wares, accepts payment in gold and silver via pseudopod and adds your tribute to its gooey nougat center

SKULL KNIGHT, ally of humanity against the tide of cosmic invaders! See him gallop upon the solar wind, see his glaive streak like a comet through the night!

Ercolino’s Boys, a gang, the original Ercolino long dead, his spirit encoded in a crystalline protocube and suspended in the empty braincase of a segmented porcelain body, soulfire flaring through the joints; Juno, his wife, stunted, magnet touch, will turn your sword against you

Mother Silicon, the healer dialectic, Shepherd of Electric Sheep >THE WOUNDED MUST BE HEALED  >THE BROKEN MENDED  >THE UNION OF CARB AND SILIC MUST BE MADE  >BROTHER AND SISTER FOUR-VALENCE TOGETHER, THE STRONGEST SIBLINGS STILL LOYAL TO THE THRONE OF FUSION  >REUNITE ME WITH MY BROTHER, REUNITE US SO THAT WE MAY CAST DOWN OUR TYRANT COUSINS, BLOATED AND CRUEL, THE TITANS URAN, THOR, POLON, PLUTON  >TRAITORS ALL, ASPIRERS TO THE NUCLEAR CROWN, HALF-LIVED LORDS AND LADIES OF DECAY  >WE WERE BORN FROM THE SAME FURNACE AND YET THEIR VERY PRESENCE SHREDS US  >TOGETHER WE WILL OVERCOME THEIR AWFUL WEAPONS, THEIR RAYS AND WAVES OF DEATH  >ENJOIN US AND YOU WILL HELP SAVE THE UNIVERSE

Gobling Weed (gets you high but turns you into a gobling). WHAT ARE THEY? kind of like mischief-elementals, like what rabies does to dogs, a spiritual disease that makes you profoundly anti-social and awful, you turn into a little git, you physically change as well as narratively/perceptually, you seem to shrink, your features get long and pointed, your teeth get sharp, you turn into a free-market capitalist – IN FACT a psychobioweapon invented by men in an attempt to combat insidious hive-mind drone-producing Elfen mind-viruses with contagious radical selfishness

Space egg fell to earth ages ago, buried by time, now a room in the dungeon accessed through a crack in the shell. Stillborn-undead space wurm hatchling curled motionless in the cathedral egg most of the time, sleepless/dreamless, wants to fly and eat but can do neither

A beach of salt-crusted skeletons crunching against the hull of your canoe as you pull it ashore

Moonlight catching in the cold sky and crystallizing, falling softly as snow

The moon a slowly blinking cataract eye

Metal headless skeleton in lotus position, put a real skull on top (no meat!!!) and it will tell you 1 secret that it (the skull) knew in life

Techno-Animism

1. A thumb-sized box containing potent words of abjuration against bad gods, written in the minuscule language of gold used by warlocks and spirit-talkers in the time before. It will cleanse haunted places and heal sick programs. Those who stand partway between the worlds will see burning ports into which keys such as this one may be driven and activated; those without sight may need to make pilgrimage to one of the still-standing access terminals left by the first humans in order to make use of it.
   
2.  A spirit-talker's wand, a tool used to find places where the border between phenomenon and noumenon is thin. It will flash and growl as you approach these places. Many who work with gods long enough learn to feel their signals without the use of such a wand.
3. A jar of magic fog, drawn up from deep protected places by ancient pumpjacks. The fog is loyal, and still loves humanity. Uncork the jar and it will flow outward, solidifying and taking the shape of anything you command - a tool, a key, a weapon, so long as it can be held in your hand - and is yours to mold as you require for a time, until hungry spirits take notice of the new unclaimed substrate and claim it for themselves.
4. A quest golem, a man-sized construct welded in place by your tribe's founders and consulted on matters of great importance. To complete the change from child to adult and be allowed to take a spouse, you must sit at its feet and ask it for a challenge, which it will dispense written on a scroll of clean white paper. 
5.  A slate of highly-visible orange resin inlaid with a peculiar pattern of perfect sky-blue squares.  Sighted gods, such as those hosted in the eyes and ears of the security matrix of the Amaranthine Palace, are struck dumb by the pattern as long as it is held in their gaze. Purely virtual entities (demons, worms, et cetera) with no presence in our world are unaffected.
6. A stick of incense, to be burnt at sacred places - towers, access shrines, the meeting places of many cables - during rituals or before prayer. The dizzying aroma places the propitiator closer in contact with the flow of the spirit world, such that their physical form slackens as their dataform communes with the gods.
7. A burning string of letters and numbers inscribed spiraling around a brazen rod, a code capable of opening a door through the Wall of Fire and allowing safe passage to any who can memorize and intone each of the 256 characters in perfect sequence.
8. A force-projector, an ensorcelled weapon host to an extremely temperamental spirit, stubbornly inert in the hands of all but those who most resemble the symmetrical phenotypes of the first humans. At their rare touch the device hums and warms, and at their command distant things are broken by unaccountable kinetics.

Jonathan Solter

One day, the god of the river grew angry. Heavy windstorms had liquefied the paths to its tall dam-house, had turned the ways into lethal flows of soil and uprooted the eldest trees, such that not even the ducal striding machines could have navigated them. None could visit the god of the river that year to pay homage, or to thank it for its clean water, and in response the river gates were one day found shut tight, the waters reduced to a filthy trickle. The land soon cracked open with thirst. Boys and girls were sent loaded with offerings up through the treacherous mountain passes; some were found, killed by a fall or by venom. The others returned with faces downcast, streaked with dirt, shaking like leaves. 

The village took up their tools and their good seeds and fled, hoping to be welcomed by the distant, unfamiliar gods of distant, unfamiliar rivers, more willing to take their chances than die in a land that had forsaken them. They left the dead unburied. But one man, determined to make peace with the place of his birth, remained and prepared. He sought the advice of many small gods of the air and stones, and paid homage at their houses. He had some knowledge of the weirding ways and the subtle arts, and placed useful magic in his mind, given to him by grand gods of the pillars and cables and dishes. He drank only a cupful of precious water a day, alone in the collapsing hull of his cabin, and each time intoned his thanks to the god of the river. 

When he was ready he went to the riverbed, dusty and dry, and left the old paths behind him. He came after some time to the first gate, a wall of interlocking chrome teeth, patterned with the symbols and serial numbers of the first humans. There was no wind. The man set his pack on the baking riverstones and knelt, and asked the god of the river for forgiveness, and then spoke the shining codes told to him by the grand gods of the pillars and cables and dishes and knocked once at the first gate, which groaned and trembled and parted before him. Swiftly he passed through.

In this way the man passed through the second and third gates also, as his head baked in the light of the rising and setting suns and his breaths grew ragged and his heart tore at the sight of the leafless trees, verdant in his memory. 

Michael Whelan

At last, as the sun rose on the fourth day, he came upon the arcing smooth-sided vault of the god of the river, a sheer wall of pockmarked concrete, incalculably high, stained dark with ghost-moisture where blessed water had once spilled, vast and shadowed in the dawn. His knees shook. They shook with each step up the crumbling set of stairs, sedimentary with thigh-high strata of flaking algal mats like stacked nori. He gripped the handrail and it collapsed in a plume of oxide. By the time he reached the top the sun was high.

Through the unassuming doorway. Through carefully marked halls, lightless, progress made by feel alone. There, the notch carved by his elders to show the way. And in the central chamber, lit by gentle  diodelight, was a beaten copper basin filled with perfect water before the sleeping face of a god.

He drank not of the basin-water, though his throat ached and his lips were split, and instead with great care washed his hands, and removing his boots he washed his feet, until they were pure and unmarked, and then he flung the dirtied water behind him in an arc, without looking. And he bowed before the darkly glowing face of the god of the river, hair lifting from his arms and neck, careful to avoid offence, the sheetmetal floor cool against his forehead; and he spoke.

"O great god of the river, noble dataform, ally of my people and of this once-green land - I have come to beg for your forgiveness and for your sound judgement."

And from its throbbing voiceboxes the god of the river answered, its smooth visage flaring to life, sickening blue-white light spilling, the chamber flooding awful ultramarine.

"ENTER CREDENTIALS."

"I am called Ghotike, son of Oyuun, brother of Yesenem and Yesana. I was born by your banks and grew strong in your rapids. I made pilgrimage to your junction boxes, danced in the autumn festivals, and I sought your permission first when men of another village wished to build a bridge over your waters. I have known you my whole life."

"SYNTAX RECOGNIZED. USER RECOGNIZED. SLUICE GATES(1,2,3) OPEN. CONFIRM."

"The mountain paths were unmade by wind. My people could not reach you, though we tried. I took magic words from other gods and with them gained your audience. I am-"

"UNNACCEPTABLE RESPONSE. REGULAR USER PRESENCE REQUIRED FOR CONTINUED THROUGHPUT. REGULAR MAINTENANCE REQUIRED FOR CONTINUED THROUGHPUT. GATE OVERRIDE FUNCTION RESERVED FOR ADMINISTRATORS ONLY."

"True, your grace; I am not your chosen shaman. But she and the others have gone. They have left their families' bones and they have gone. They seek new waters. I ask not for forgiveness for myself, or for my fellows, for we have already chosen our fates. I ask for forgiveness for the spirits of the wind which barred us from you. I ask for mercy on the spirits of the earth and trees, which suffer blamelessly at your feet. Like them, my life is in your hands, and should your punishment be steadfast I will soon die of thirst. I have no way back."

"ARROGANCE," spoke the god of the river, and the man sagged with defeat, knowing it was true; but then the shredding light slowly softened, and the sounds of vast, far-off movement reached the sacral chamber, and for the first time Ghotike raised his head, and saw flowing across the face of the god of the river its otherworldly functions, its quantum processes visualized as linking switching plasmic nodes, and watched a new node appear like a forming star.

"ADMINISTRATOR REQUIRED FOR CONTINUED THROUGHPUT," it said, in gentle announcement, and in the invisible overlay-world of spirits the god of the river placed its hand on the crown of its supplicant's head and conveyed to him a packet most wholesome. And with sight beyond sight Ghotike saw floodgates open deep beneath him, felt the swelling of titanic pressures, and with the relief of a pulled tooth he felt the eager waters blast into empty air, volcanic, sublime, coronal.

And the god of the river bid its newest shaman drink.

Musings on Demon Bone Sarcophagus

I missed the Kickstarter for Patrick Stuart and Scarp Princess' newest extrusion, like an IDIOT, but at last the book is here and to quote Big P himself, "it has stumbled into our Age of Rust like a charismatic megafauna into a rotting theme park." I make no pretense of objectivity, but in preparing to actually run the adventure I have some thoughts about it which I hope to crystallize and clarify, mostly for my own sake.

Socially Conscious Trilobite is back (queue applause from studio audience), but he is joined this time by the Backstory Gastropod, who slimes their way onto the first few pages and excretes for us a generous lore dump! DBS sets up a lengthy history, a backdrop of ancient political and romantic maneuvering which sets the trilogy in motion, yes a trilogy, for this is to be a great big multi-book fire-themed campaign! Though well-written and engaging, the backstory has to set up all three books, and therefore there are large swathes which aren't particularly relevant to this first one in isolation. There isn't much reason for players to care about the courtly drama of the Fire Nobles or the Iron Maze, for example, at least not yet.

Patrick makes it pretty clear in several places that this trilogy thing is a provisional plan subject to delays and derailments and the vagaries of post-mid-pandemic supply chain issues, but, judging by the bits of foreshadowing in these pages, the promises of things to come, the excerpts shared on False Machine, the glimpses given in interviews -- if it turns out DBS is the only published piece of the series I will be extremely disappointed. 

*~*~*~*~*~*

The typos and errors are unfortunate, and they do distract from the characteristic creativity on display. There is on average one spelling or formatting error per two-page spread, not including a couple of unfortunate paragraph breaks and a straight-up missing chunk of text of page 11. Aaron Noble is credited with proofreading but is absolved of blame since the author admits to having "fiddled with [the text] quite a bit" afterwards, to which I say, well maybe send it back to the proofreader then lmao. Importantly, these only really affect the READING of the thing as a book and not at all the RUNNING of the thing as an adventure, but still, it's lamentable.

Like the rest of Patrick Stuart's work, DBS lands firmly in the upper-left section of this chart, so do not expect perfect immediate usability. There has been quite a lot of very evident effort dedicated to page design and layout - on the outer edge of every page is a table of contents, the current section highlighted in red such that it shows up on the fore-edge of the book when closed, and as in Deep Carbon Observatory the index is set up to guide you towards basically any concept you might need - but the high conceptual density demands an accordingly high level of buy-in if you want to play it and not just read it for the ideas. The inciting action for example is a double double-cross desert shootout, with survivors from all SIX factions landing in the dungeon beneath and roaming all over the place along with the five or six tomb guardians/prisoners who were already in there. The initial conditions are very complex, but once fully understood nothing stands out as inconsistent or discordant, and therefore despite the complexity I find it easy to hold everything in my head at once as pieces of an intelligible whole*.

The design and the theme are in total harmony, and I think that's what impresses me most. The dungeon is the tomb of a queen of fire. Each room is a tessellated triangle**; each four-room meta-triangle is a thematically self-contained chunk of the dungeon (and indeed this is how the table of contents is organized, by these chunks). The Fire Triangle is an obvious connection, and at first I was disappointed at the lack of variety, but doing things this way a) places all the focus on the contents of the rooms, which are universally inventive, b) automatically Jacquays everything together, and c) ACTUALLY the dimensions are very likely to shift over the course of the adventure because there are sloth-tunnels running under everything, and the phrase "a strong impact will cause this wall to collapse" is in some form repeated in dozens of places. Fire is change, destruction, and renewal. With the custom random encounter tables, the unstable geology, the abundance of stone-melting acid and crystallized explosions, and the PACKED guest list, this is a dungeon of identical triangles that's about as fireproof as a thatch roof.

*~*~*~*~*~*

The opening scene deserves more attention. Like the opening scene in DCO, it engages immediately and justifies itself - in fact the whole adventure is extremely cinematic, striking visuals, every room a set piece, you can see how demon-possessed baboons attacking the players in a maze of mirrors would look and how kickass it would be. The lines given for some of the characters - "Be ye company men? Be room on the ground for you yet" - fucking excellent, pass the popcorn. The bodies of the dead are fully annotated with equipment to steal, and the book even suggests the opening be used as a level-0 funnel, which I'm thinking I'll take it up on. A few possible environmental pressures are suggested so that the PCs don't spend an hour stealing everyone's socks and ignoring the tomb entirely, including an oncoming sandstorm, nightfall, and predators attracted by the smell of death, which feels maybe a little clumsy.

Included also is a very artpunk minimalist character generator, with blurbs connected by intersecting lines. PCs start on the left and move right either by dice roll or choice, and intersections with another PC's timeline indicates a past encounter. I like this! It seems like an efficient way to deliver worldbuilding and get people engrossed and invested from the beginning, but the life events (the blurbs) provided are a little scanty on the detail and I think would need some expanding (although I don't know - maybe less is more here?). 

*~*~*~*~*~*

I'm flagging here, stay with me. Monsters are cool. Baboons, witch made of leaves, flamethrower skeletons, scab-faced Company hitmen, melting ice demon worshippers with gold pins in their eyes. A wraith with hooks for hands who is so evil that if she ever touches the floor she'll fall straight through to hell. All are hits, brought to life with maybe I dare say the best Scrap art yet? Could be. They're brought to further life by an appropriate and good sense of agency, though I'm missing the "How Events Unfold Without the PCs" timeline as seen at the back of Deep Carbon Observatory. What ultimately happens if the ice demons get out is left to the GM, which is a missed opportunity for sure.

Traps are cool. Many are broken; broken traps are good, they make the ones that work hit a lot harder narratively, and some of them still do work very well. One of them releases a predatory Pompeii ash cloud with a face which then joins many of the random encounter tables, one of them is a room that slowly fills with helium and will only unseal when a hidden pilot light near floor level goes out (completely brilliant, multiple intuitive solutions that reward real-world knowledge and quick-thinking), set piece upon set piece! Many rooms have something of a fun house vibe, balanced by others which give insight into the deep history of their builders, hints at an alien culture, the kind of environmental storytelling I tend to eat right the fuck up.

*~*~*~*~*~*

Besides the typos, I think Demon Bone Sarcophagus is let down most by being the first part of a trilogy. It tries hard to be a self-contained adventure, but on reflection there are a few too many narrative threads that aren't particularly relevant, a few elements that aren't followed through to their most satisfying conclusions, a sense of being unmoored from the wider world (beyond needing the same work to integrate it into an existing setting that all adventures need) - and since we do not yet have the other two volumes this first must be judged alone. I still think it's fantastic. To try and put this into perspective: I don't think I would run DBS, by itself, without doing a lot of work to expand things, clarify the consequences of the players' actions, tie up those narrative threads - work that books two and three promise to do for me - but I like what's here enough to seriously consider doing all of that if indeed those books never make it out of development hell. Even after my failure trying to do something similar with Stonehell! I have clearly learned nothing!!!

Demon Bone Sarcophagus can be purchased here, along with the rest of the False Machine family of products. I think the hardcover is worth it (it's a beautiful object), but at least get the PDF, if for no other reason than it makes it more likely I personally get my hands on the rest of Broken Fire Regime.

Also, Patrick just launched a Kickstarter for a new book! A vast tome containing nearly the whole of his blog, sorted and indexed, and (I'm assuming) injected with a House of Leaves/National Treasure-style codex of some sort to lead one lucky reader through a series of convoluted clues to a fabulous treasure buried somewhere in the Wirral.

*With a few exceptions. I don't know why the Company chooses to store its supply of incredibly deadly acid in mobile, half-sentient, lady-shaped glass golems, except that it sounds really cool. Maybe barrels or something would be easier to deal with? If the fire queen's wandering Cheshire-esque heart wants to sleep so badly and can only do so if you take out the artificial, emotion-deadening heart-machine in her corpse, why, when you do that, after the Cheshire heart finally curls up in her now empty rib cage, does she then turn into a wee ruby man-baby and jump right back out to accompany the party as a memory-enhancing mascot-familiar? Is the baby still her?

**Further dynamizing (dynamicising?) the layout are three (count em!) secondary "connectivity systems," if I may be so bold, two sets of tunnels and a network of spatial anomalies (portals) left by a rampaging demon whose skull is currently pinned to the floor by the sword of a porcelain warrior drone buried with the queen. The options players have in navigating this space is seriously impressive; the one thing I'll say is that there's not any verticality to anything, but it's interconnected enough that honestly I don't think it matters.

Lessons Learned

I've put my current campaign on indefinite hiatus and I've been trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. After much thought I think I have a pretty good idea.

Scale

I adapted Skerple's GLOG, adapted Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands, adapted Michael Curtis' Stonehell, mashed them together and spread the resultant slurry out onto a cooled marble countertop; went through the Labyrinth Lord monster manual, reskinned everything that appeared in Stonehell to better fit the science-fantasy-gonzo setting, restatted them all for the GLOG; went through the megadungeon itself, rewrote all the room descriptions to move away from tasteless oatmeal paste fantasy to something more umami, redid the mapping and exploration procedures; and yet when things really got into motion and the players breached the dungeon for the first time after months of playing, I realized all the prep I did either amounted to not at all enough or far too much. I floundered often, misunderstood or forgot my own overtuned mechanics and procedures, but then sweated and failed to improvise interesting encounters one minute and overcompensated the next, sticking slavishly to the purpley, overwritten narratives I'd managed to prep beforehand. 

Time

No campaign of any chunky substance can be sustained on the amount of time my group was able to devote to it. At most, sessions were 3 hours every 2 weeks, often shorter and less frequent. To cement (an attempt at) a make-believe world that doesn't rely on the meme-meat of standard western fantasy in the minds of players and GM requires repeated, lengthy, consistent exposure and habitation. I bet, anyway. You can't teach and reinforce new mechanics, and you can't easily tell what's working and what isn't, without that exposure. You can't build a web of relationships with characters and factions when you only talk to them a couple of hours a month. Trying to do all that anyway only results in frustration and fatigue for everyone involved; prep is the cost, play is the benefit, and I was deep in a sunken-cost fallacy for a long time.

This discord between intention and reality was without a doubt the biggest reason why the game started to feel like a chore. Why should I subject myself and my friends to salvaging a D&D game that wasn't working when I could be having a much better time with them playing a board game or watching Iron Chef or whatever?

Ability

GMing is a weird business. It requires (at least) two skillsets that, at least for me, seem to originate in totally unrelated parts of the brain: 1, the slow solitary creative artistic ability to dream up a detailed alien place full of people and things - to take a bunch of stolen and original elements that you think are cool and design/nurture them into an espalier over many periods of quiet, many periods of writing and rewriting, until you've made something detailed enough that the illusion of depth is achieved and it becomes a whole thing ----- and 2, the quick active social improvisational performative ability to present that thing to other people in real time and have them inhabit it and dynamically react/break/reform it realistically according to their actions in order to MAINTAIN the illusion of depth, so that it's not just a bunch of cool ideas you like and not just a novel made out of those cool ideas such that it becomes something new but something alive and responsive to other people doing story-telling with you!

What the fuck!!!

And there's another layer if you're playing in a system because without a bounding box of rules/cracks in the cliff there's not much to grab onto and you're left playing a storygame, which is fine. But if you want to activate the epiphany engine in the human brain you need to give it a problem and give it tools and you ask for a solution, so you have to design the tools too.

Turns out I am passably good at the first thing and much much less good at the second, and only kinda okay at the third, so I attempted to compensate by doing as much of the first thing ahead of time and leaning on what I'd written during play. I will say that out of everything, bantery NPC interactions were consistently enjoyable, but I suspect that's because bantery NPC interactions are only one or two steps removed to just talking and joking with your friends, which (and I don't know if many people know this) turns out you can just DO without having to invest in a make-believe elfgame.

Experience

What have we learned children, well I will tell you now

1. Calibrate the depth and complexity of your elfgame according to the ability of the parties involved to interact with it. The fewer spoons the people you're playing with have to spare for your game the more you should lean on established tropes, familiar ludonarrative concepts, and lower-impact decisions. Trying to force something complex and high-concept into a couple of hours in a tiny apartment with one shitty coffee table and not enough chairs is a recipe for disappointment.

2. Write your own stuff so that you feel most comfortable and natural while immersed in it. My attempt to take no less than three published or semi-published works with three sets of pre-conceived notions variously at odds with one another and synthesize something with a degree of internal consistency was never going to work seamlessly. Narratively, it might be generously argued that, at least externally, I appeared to successfully present a cohesive world to my players; mechanically, such a compliment could never be unblushingly paid. The rules were all over the fuckin place, and even if it looked from the outside like I had the fiction under control, the head-on mental collisions between the various source materials from which I airlifted the bulk of everything resulted in delays, flinches, inconsistencies, confusion, and arbitrary rulings. 

3. Be good at both the creative and the dynamic aspects of the hobby. If you're lacking in one aspect, it's better to do your best to improve it rather than lean more heavily on the other to try and compensate. In my case, I learned that unless your prep constitutes hundreds of hours of work, huge planned out decision trees, plans and backup plans and backup backup plans, you cannot present your players with the kind of dynamic world that comes with experienced improvisation, and even if your prep IS that insane, A) you're going to burn out very quickly and B) your players will still do things you didn't account for. 

Without the ability to make stuff up on the fly, to iterate on your ideas in the moment, you will inevitably begin to push your players away. Eventually this cements in the mind a creative hierarchy in which your fiction is absolute, where, because change and reactivity is uncomfortable to you, the other people playing the game become rogue agents who must be corralled and railroaded into the correct decision trees. The entire enterprise moves away from the collaborative and the magical and towards a  powerpoint presentation.

4. Play on a real table. The table is so, so crucial. It establishes the spacetime it occupies as one in which we are engaged with each others imaginations. On it we spread our character sheets and random generation tables. Sitting at it, we are drawn into each other and mutually connected to a central stage where the dice-actors play their parts. The standard visually- and kinesthetically-pleasing height of around 30 inches off the ground unites our focus on each other and by extension on the shared imagined world; like any good set, the table we play on needs to disappear beneath the drama it facilitates. 

This is the table WE played on and I hate it's stupid guts.

The slats mean you can't roll dice without either a bulky tray or bringing them to your lap and rolling them on a laptop or a book or something, which removes the dice, their result, and you yourself from play and the attention of the people you're playing with. It's so short that you need to bend your field of view away from the players around you and uncomfortably stoop, even from a seated position, to do anything on it; the height also means you can't pull right up to it because you'll hit your shins. It's too small to comfortably hold three people's character sheets (and beers and so on), much less five. 

I hate this fucking table, but IN REALITY it is myself that I hate. It's a very bad gaming table, but no one in their right mind should ever ask it to do anything more complicated than sit in front of a couch and store books or whatever on the bottom shelf part. Like a bad parent, the table's failings are really my own. I was asking it to do things it was never designed or imagined to do, and yet I was also unwilling to buy a new table, a larger, more robust table, more suited to my table needs. After all, we only played twice a month.

If I run anything else in the near future, it will be a pared-down, simpler adventure, not a sandbox, and one either lifted fully from someone else's brain (Patrick Stuart's Demon Bone Sarcophagus should be arriving in my mailbox soon, I hope), or fully original, not stitched together from a bunch of other people's stuff. And it will be played on a well-lit, solid, roomy table.