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. 

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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.

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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?). 

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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.

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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.