The lack of content on here is a little like a bruise: I keep forgetting it's there until I bump into it wrong, and then ow, dang. I dunno man. Maybe I'll start just posting my prep notes for my current game, just to have something.
Right now I'm getting my players into Patrick Stuart's GHOUL MARKET now that they've gotten into and out of the Deep Carbon Observatory, in the greater context of Luka Rejec's Ultraviolet Grasslands. They've received a letter from an unknown group asking them to fix the Market beneath the Violet City by any means necessary; the Market is an upward expression of one of the Benign Hells and it moves around underground like a traveling cyst in the earth, stopping beneath various cities every few years like a cursed Olympics. If kept beneath the city, alliance could be made, trade could take place, deals could be brokered, or, failing all that, the Market could be invaded by the Violet Megaduchess's Subterranean Mech Corps and taken by force. Payment is promised in coins of occultum.
Two ways are known for the living. The first is through the Deep Streets, buried roads and cellars where the sewage runs, beneath the city. Below those are forgotten colonnades, and under those are caverns, and at the deepest point there will be a stairway cut into the stone which the Market has made. Listen hard, and you will hear the toots of terrible revelry drifting up from deep below!
The second is through the River of Bones, which runs through the Market, so spelled to split and pour and fall into the stone itself! There may be other ways of calling the ferry, but the tales say that you must fill a skull with gold and build round it a fire by the river’s edge. Start when the sun is high, and keep it lit till the night is deep, and when the embers are all out the ferryman will come slipping through the mist.
BUT BEWARE! No mortal human may pass into the Great Ghoul Market. Those who still breathe of who feast not on the flesh of their own kind best go in disguise!
Where do you get a skull? The crypts beneath the city are well guarded
against bone-thieves, a necessity in a city so full of wizards. Dr. Grondor Disophagus’ Medical Surplus
Depot (There’s Nothing Grander Than Grondor!) collects all sorts of offcuts
from the city’s chop-shops (surplus, as in, all the stuff left over). He’s got
a shitload of skulls for sale for a ducat (and other things besides), but FUCK
ME is his shop hard to find (he’s actually got an anti-orthogonal obfuscatatron
hooked up in the back), and you’ll need directions.
Try those same chop-shops perhaps? Gorpie and Sons Vatworks is a great choice. Office building with a lot more tubes than usual. Classy waiting room but dingy hallways open up onto a basement-level warehouse of glass vats full of nutrient fluid and half-grown parts, overworked biomancer associates with their arms in those rubber glove windows tweaking and shuffling the stem cells around. A few operating rooms, “This won’t hurt a bit!”
Catch one of Gorpie’s titular sons (name of Benedict) smoking a cig in the back alley; he is ratty, stained, shaken, thin, easily intimidated. “The alley between 58 and 60 Looming Street. Just keep turning left!” 33 lefts. Or you can just kill a guy, no need to make things complicated.
For materials to summon the ferry: Grondor’s Medical Surplus, as written. A lingish man with a glitchy robot leg and big eyes. Go on back to Gorp Corp and shake down Benedict for info.
Another avenue of attack: head down into the crypt, but it’s full of fucking lasers and its got headache-patterns all over the walls (can’t concentrate on spells) because a hundred years ago, when the university was expanding, the fucking wizard undergrads kept stealing skeletons (use https://dysonlogos.blog/2021/03/28/ashlords-fall/ - these are the lower human crypts, merely a chunk of the greater complex physically cut off from spiritually-superior humans and the carefully mummified remains of the catlords.)
For information about the ferry: Vidalia Onion the feline librarian can set them up pretty well. The ritual is a human skull, mouth and braincase filled with gold (I don’t know, 100 pieces sounds fine) and build a fire around it, douse it at midnight. This is explained in a rotating projecto-cillynder titled “Index of Pre-Rainbow Order Folklore, Vol. 4” subtitle “That Which Could Be Remembered,” accompanied by gristly diagrams. She will let you look at it but insists that she watch you the entire time.
For information about ghouls: Mrs Onion probably has some stuff for you on that one as well. Living people who eat the dead. Touch causes agony. Tight jaundiced skin, claws, insatiable hunger, sharp, glitter-prick eyes. Might refer you to a colleague if they ask too many complicated questions - Ravishing Tugboat, necroscholar extraordinaire (one vertical half of the dude is just his vascular system, but held in the original shape by occult fields).
Ghouls and wendigos are the same thing, just like, one tends to hunt in the wilderness and the other tends to hang around civilization, maybe? Something about eating human flesh fucks up the spirit. Common knowledge holds that the body-soul-personality triad loses integrity like a decaying atom and degrades into something awful and dark when you dig up a guy and eat him. That’s mostly true, but they’re missing the whole part about the astral prions that corpses tend to collect without the protection of their kaba, like mars without its magnetosphere, and how they get into the souls of corpse-cannibals and start refolding their metaphysical proteins into cursed geometries.
People go to one of the Hells when they die if they haven’t cultivated any favor with any of the orbital gods, or none of them want to bother with shepherding their shit to the RECYCLING INFINITY OF NOTHINGNESS - ultimately that’s the deal that people strike with the divine. The Benign Hells are pretty tame, not much more suffering than there is in life, and Saint Mohorovicic blocked off the Serious Hells a long time ago, so no one needs to worry about them. With enough atonement and refinement, people can make it up to RIN themselves, it’s just way more difficult. Far more often they just languish there. Some debased things can come and go from the upper layers; these include ghouls.
For disguises: you’ll either have to eat the consecrated dead, which probably isn’t an option (defo not enough time, although you could I guess splurge and get pure uncut ghoul proteins), or actually disguise yourself.
FOR THE SKIN: You can go to tattoo parlors (L’Ultime, run by Haruna Jebolex. dwarfy lady of great dexterity and color, only spots not inked up are two kidney-shaped bits on her back that she can’t reach) or maybe a carpenter’s for some woodstain (Iosefka the Cabinettress is a good bet, she’s fucking WILD though, farther along in the elf-infection than most halfsies, but until she walks into the Wall of Wood she’s churning out some really incredible work).
FOR THE CLAWS: You can always superglue some amatuer scrimshaw to your fingers. You can get some actual implants too (probably 100 silver, 150 if you want anesthetic).
FOR THE SMELL: There are some really exciting advances happening in the smell-sector, which tends to grow up along with biomantically-enhanced sensorial implants. To smell like a ghoul, you have to smell a little like old piss, and also gravedirt, bones, meat, all the breath stuff, but ALSO many ghouls perfume themselves with orange peels and tea leaves to better blend in, so a whisper of those. THEY DO NOT SWEAT, and this is the main challenge. Ghouls have excellent noses.
Go to Pasand the Gland Man for a goopy solution (puts a bioport in your armpits, you can pop in various smell-generators like fucking Glade plugins for a group rate of 100 silver each, custom made smelly puff glands for 25-50 silver depending on specificity), or go a more traditional route: vials of concentrated SMELL FLUID with cotton stuffed in the top, seal up the sweats, paint the teeth, get silly.
FOR THE STORY: You’ll need to be prepared; the ghouls will ask questions. They’re wary of interlopers invading their carnival (the only place where maybe, maybe, they can escape the godawful shame of what they’ve done), and are also fucking HUNGRY ALL THE FUCKING TIME, so if they think you’re human they’ll gobble you up. You’ll have to know when and where your first taste was, what graveyard (“Ah, at the lost crypts of Vivex, perchance? Got my start there myself, or might have, might not have been the START, uh, but things really started in EARNEST over in Vivex, you know?”) what era of history (roll on the UVG tables).
Then, the Boatman!
Nothing for a long time. But then a growing guttering, a diffuse white light, resolving into a grotesque lamp artfully smithed in the shape of a long gaping head, light spilling from the open mouth and wide empty eyes. The boatman. He(?) stands tall at the stern of his gondola, the final shape to emerge from the coiling mist, preceded by his boat, a long low vessel of black sheets of metal curled like wasp-paper around the boatman’s bundle of quiet passengers. He is draped with coats and wraps of tin wire, his hands (when you get a glimpse of them) shrunken and pale and bedecked with jewels, his head hidden beneath a matte black gas mask, those great glass bug eyes locked with yours. He drifts to a stop along the shore and beckons you aboard with a practiced, languid gesture.
The boatman grips a long lever, the throttle for the coughing combustion motor that propels his grim conveyance.
