For those short on time, here are my favorite passages excerpted from the Gardens of Anomie.
Engraving is general across the walls of the six buildings.
Stony star-shapes summoned from a dawning sky-vortex, blood sacrifice upon the pitch.
Male figures ten feet tall hand-in-hand with women half their size. Serpents lazily overlooking asymmetric lovemaking in the orchards.
The moment of carving when the giants scooped away their own genitals as one.
The destruction of whole walled cities, a sprouting of form, a transformation among the great ones. Cities laid on the table. People standing on the rooftops agape at the giant sitting down to eat. Houses cut in two, cross-sectioned with cutlery.
The building of ships, stages, sets where men are ground like wheat. The first floodlights clicking on above sawdust blood-bowers to-be. The unearthing of the scorpions; a flood of them being led into the Garden.
Many brides perished in those first days of horror. Some of heartbreak, some of hemlock, some, finally, upon the table. But some remain.
They were pushed beneath the garden near the waters that once washed them and their quarters given over to the strange animals bred by the Anomites as ammunition.
They wander here in the funnels between deadroot and foundation where the vines which the waters snaked past to caress the garden’s thigh are now poisoned by spite and thirst. For the brides who remain here have not forgotten the solar caress which they once knew, though the angels have forgotten them. So near the mother of rains these women have not perished but their subterranean yearning has warped them into clomping hags just as it has twisted the roots of the poisonous coils of thorns.
The Crones are still massively sympathetic to the Anomites and their people; they remember the days when the Hanging Gardens were built for them. They believe the Anomites will remember them yet. They are aware many women did not survive the fall. They are unaware of the Anomites’ self-emasculation.
They wander these caverns and carry poisoned pins which inflame wounds. They will hang you on poisoned thorns and torment you with their pins for threatening their angels.
Marching down the valley from this gehenna is a column of five hundred men.
They are clad in hooded black tunics girt with leathern cross-straps bearing sun-discs of gold bleeding with gemslivers laid between the radial veins of light like pools of stained glass wine beneath fallen limbs and wings.
Their arms, calves and chests shine like wavetops with golden plate and scale. On closer inspection, this has been somehow bonded to their actual skin. It cannot be removed without removing the skin.
Tiny gold and silver chains hang like silky spiderwebs between fastnesses set into their chests and shoulders and slinking back and forth along their lengths go tiny statues; graven sphalerite icons of women in gowns, old men writing at desks, clumps of children. The things these men no longer see.
Tucked in broad belts are slithering flamberge daggers, iron question marks with alabaster pommels linked to necklaces by delicate chains.
They have their red rawhide calfskin gloves tucked beneath their belts. Some belts are buffalo fur, others the witch-weird flesh of river snails.
They wear armored torcs and have lengths of canvas twisted around daily servings of tobacco, a linen chain of balls hanging about the neck. Their white teeth are studded with black chew.
The straps of their sandals wind up their legs like parched and undead vines, but some are lined with glittering snakeskin or lengthy climbing caterpillars of buffalo fur.
Red sheets of corded twine broaden here and shimmer there across their bodies, discrete strands bobbing as they move their shoulders.
Some wear catfurs across their shoulders beneath their hoods, tails hanging down the back or arm.
They walk with staves that have unique hafts but uniform cylindrical sockets atop them. One staff might be ivory and notched with cinnabar fire descending through a milky sky, while another is alabaster with jade notching throughout like platforms of grass. A third is a glossy purple metal like a flutelike decanter of wine. And so forth.
Each man has two dozen thin cylinders hanging about him. Some clatter from apostle bandoliers draped around their bodies, others clink round the hems of their tunics like wind chime tassels, others are clasped to the lengths of their limbs by black bindings to turn sword blows. Some have thin gold line-etchings of trees writ deep into their lacquered surfaces, others are bony enamel and writhe with obsidian inkstains bearing bloodstain apples, others are wrapped in sapphire snakeskin and have actual snake heads blinking at the tips, and others are rough sandstone sarcophagi that riot with hidden multitudes within. These cylinders may be slotted into their staves and sent whirling about the party with gasping detonations of unearthly payloads. See Appendix 6: Fruits of the Garden for the most common types of warlock grenade.
The soldiers joyously sing a funerary dirge as they march; ancient language expertise reveals that it is about the death of one’s friends on the battlefield, with the porters murmuring over their corpses in disbelief. It is a boast of the horrors of war.
They are marching to one of their wild slave raids. Alas the people are wrong about this. This is wishful thinking. They do not enslave their captives.
Above you in the reddened clouds there are occasional flickers of darkness. These are warlocks who glide the arid winds on wicker wings stretched with spiderskin.
There he lays a black-boned skeleton swaddled in what remains of a midnight-blue raiment bound fast around his crown by an iron-girt circlet studded with lapis lazuli. Across his chest is a starry nebula of gemstones set in silver, a triptych of treasure hinged about his shoulders and lain atop him like the law tablet of a geode.
Around his bony wrists are white gold bracelets in four quarters around fat dollops of ruby segmenting the monorail. They are bound by tiny gold chains; this was how he closed his eyes, wrists clasped in the high finery of the Anomite age.
The waters wait, dark and hidden with congested magic.
They curl about themselves soft and azure glowing within rich and warm soil beneath the fallow planters of their fallen gardens. This is where the waters have built a bower in which to lay, a place of richness in an ocean of sand. They dream of the sun and sky that once made them glitter, now cut off on the other side of the Garden’s wall. The waters look to the four winds and wait to meet once more such a desire as once inspired them in times of cool spring. They bore fruit for the love of angels and womankind, and this valley was a bedsheet for their rapture. Alas the hearts of angels as men are inconstant and when blood began to soil the sweet streams of the sea snails the waters recoiled and recalled their melody from the sounding valley.
With nowhere to go in this vast desert, the waters fell back into the aquifer and wept while the garden hung with husks and the stones who had known dancing feet cracked beneath the weight of their bereavement.
A purple candelabra writ with white engravings, places where the paint has been peeled away to show the white wax wherein there are symbols of universal rebirth, for few things will survive the closing and the opening but one can step outside the galaxy by the incandescent ekembrites instilled in the antediluvian fat of this preconstructed candle. It will entrap you in an alternate energy form and things will be lost in your reassembly but perhaps an element of your consciousness will survive, for that is the only thing somewhat translatable across universes- but even then information is corrupted.
When you burn this candelabra and sit in its center upon a small steel dais set between the candles, you will be entwined and perforated by the mites of the steel mist and writ into energy currentsimperceptible to mortals of this dimension; you will be spun into the systematic energetic undercurrents of another universe in a way that is able to keep your consciousness more or less consecutive by locating a set of reoccurring energy streams that are compatible with your pattern. Your location will be held by the mites until it is time for you to return to this universe.
Roll a d20:
1: 71 hours
2-10: d20 years
11-19: d100 x d100 years
d20: d100 x 1M years
When you reenter this universe your consciousness will erase the consciousness of another being of your species who is nearest the place of your departure and you will occupy their body until its natural death.
If there is no suitable host available, for example if you utilized the candelabra to escape an extinction event, you will be held in a buffer- an energy entrapment pattern in a suitable host such as a star- until there evolves an organism capable of hosting your re-insertion.
Information corruption is inevitable in this process. Roll a d20 for effects:
1-5: -2d20 IQ
6-10: Retrograde amnesia
11-14: Amygdalian corruption: Extremely poor impulse control and lack of fear
15-18: Hippocampal corruption: Extreme furtiveness and neuroticism
19: Pattern breach: entities rewrite your personality for their purposes or install a backdoor or spy.
20: Left-body paralysis
Naturally this is one way to escape death.
Black musculata, arms and legs. Porcelain wings and volcanic claws, eight sapphire eyes piercing a milky helm, obsidian shard-blades flange its crown.
A gossamer white robe clinging to fatless, fleshless gifts of snakeskin-wrapped muscle. A straining, skinless head, ivory coins upon the eyes, for once this creature conspired to die. A golden wreath about sunken temples.
In ribcage hangs an ambergris brazier whose silkclouds snake between spice-speckled bones.
Plates of ivory, plates of jet in harlequin diamond round him set. Red eyes gleam past a twinkling mask held before his face on a pair of little arms from his upper chest, one jet and one ivory.
A palanquin his own four legs wrapped regally in crimson cape held hand-in-hand before his chest, a lace of gold brocade an inch from every bangled lip. He lays against a seatback throne of velvet pierced with brazen studs, it balanced on his rearmost thighs with oaken slats on femur set. He is a howdah and a burden-beast, a puppet hand and his own priest.
Tales of the Warlock-raiders of Anomie describe sorcerous staffs of many powers.
Indeed. They have many means of capturing you for the blood pits or the tablecloth.
There are three categories of staffshell: dumbfire, airburst and discarding-sabot.
Seer’s stone: Dumbfire crystal linked to a Warlock’s glass eye.
Fin-stabilized discarding sabot serpent shell: This is the extreme long-range Warlock Grenade due to the lightness of its warhead. A snake encased to the neck in a rigid, fin-stabilized tube. The user adjusts the snake-release range by moving a sliding knob up or down the staff to set the detonation distance before firing. When the missile has reached 90% of its range, a gunpowder fuse (set by the slide) detonates and frees the enraged serpent to strike at whoever it lands near. This round is also useful as a close-range chemical weapon because the serpent’s venom sac can be squeezed with a thumb, ejecting a spray; this can be employed once a day or so assuming the serpent has been fed. The fin-stabilized discarding-sabot concept would be a valuable prize for city-state engineers.
Scorpiorion shell: Airburst round loading dozens of small megavenomous scorpions. Their hemotoxic stings bloat up extremities to 2-3 sizes their original mass, drooping, useless, red, and necrotizing into the bloodstream. This shell uses the aforementioned sliding knob to set the scorpiorion shell’s detonation range fuse before firing.
Agrippan beeswax stinger grenade: The fruits of the hanging garden’s beekeepers, this alchemical wonder bursts in the air and sprays a misting of molten beeswax over the target area. Once exposed to oxygen the beeswax bonds at the molecular level with whatever it touches and gradually sets into a ceramic as hard as stone over the course of about a minute. Simple water will prevent the bonding process if applied within 30 seconds, though this was a sacrifice Anom’s enemies were often unwilling to make. This is the origin of the golden-armored bodies of the Warlocks; it is not gold or gilded, but hard-set Agrippan beeswax permanently bound into their flesh. This is a sacrifice; the unnatural and interruptive grafts bother the warriors all day.
Armor piercing discarding sabot love dart penetrator: The love dart of a psychoactive river snail from the time of the hanging gardens. It is sharp-tipped and somewhat rigid, but bendy enough that you could use it to strangle a foe from behind. The dart drips in anticipation. If it hits, d4 snails begin gestation inside the target, emitting megadoses of hallucinogen intended to incapacitate the target while keeping them alive during the three-day gestation period. While the hallucinogen is technically nontoxic, it will gradually psychologically dissolve the target.
5 minutes: the victim begins to see the material world disassociated from his or her personal frame or schema; instead of seeing the world in an instrumental way, the victim simply sees the matter of the objects in question and must focus very hard to know what to do with them and what their context even is.
8 hours: the victim will have developed a radically open personality.
24 hours: the victim will only barely recognize familiar forms; they will be capable of gardening unsupervised, and that’s about it.
48 hours: the victim is completely psychically dissolved and able to respirate but not swallow
72 hours: the snail worms its way out of the host’s rectum.
The only way to stop the process is the surgical removal of the embryonic snails. The surgeon should be careful as the snail ichor carries the hallucinogen.
An alternative round is the love dart flechette canister round, which contains a bundle of love darts from sea snails younger than the ones which standard darts are derived from. When these canister rounds burst, a shotgun blast of small love darts hits the target area. Each delivers only a single embryonic sea snail rather than the d4 from a mature penetrator.
Diamond dust round: The cloud from this airburst round perforates lungs and degloves eyes.
He is the Honey Knight.
He was a mighty mason taken captive on the dunes. His test in the Playsets was a driftwood castle set afire, with children tied among the highest branches. The mason rescued one but couldn’t reach the other. He dragged his ward through the fire and the flame but was horrifyingly burnt. He is beloved of the Anomites now, who fused his sloughing flesh with the musculata, mask, greaves and braces of gold honey plate from the bees of paradise. He cannot speak any longer, but the boy can tell the party about him.
He despises the mutilated angels. He cares only for the boy he rescued, who was spared from the table using the sole wish granted the mason by the Anomites for his performance.
The Warlocks live on caravan raiding. This is where their bounty is kept. Aching moats of rice greet the party when they enter, bags blasted open by being flung on the floor spilling alps of shivering snow-spikes, here and there bales of barley by the bushel wound up in twine and hairy like filth-matted dogs, buckets of beans like ten thousand inverse eyes all distended pupil with but a fleck of white to bear the burden, sausages rotating in space like medals to be contemplated, pears on pears in baskets pushing stem down into mottled flesh like sister-sabotaging bucket crabs, whole heaps of jerky on bloodstained butcher paper, their innermost reaches bearing an ephemeral glow like the last light in the eyes of a dying life, sweet potatoes with their skin split in transit looking like autumn in the earth, dumplings losing face and deflating before the onslaught of pretzel sticks tearing them gaping and shivering to spill a salty brew from their innards inappropriately over the crystalline skin of ripe apples whose fragrance dominates all, a spring victor, orchard king, ringing word of plenty over the meek voices of subtler cohorts. The Warlocks could bathe in their grain, riding ass-first down dusty piles of oats or diving nosefirst into vast quivering casks of strawberry jam, swinging about on whole banana bunches like lemonade chandeliers, or climbing two-by-two vast ropes of licorice slimy and dank like the pseudopods of a giant spider’s nasal parasite. The giant erotic ass of a plum. The butter bounty of coffee beans, mudstaining cocoa lumps like unicorn turds, calamari tentacles that point accusingly over the ice, you, you, you.
Waist-deep in water is a stone. It was once tall and majestic, a tablet of law for a thousand tiny tribes who once stood in harmony beholding his kneeling shoulders. When the angels came the people besought him, “o stone of worth and prophecy, give our bodies to the angels that we may host the gift of God.” And the stone did as they asked and gave union to seven men of the tribes and the seven angels lit with celestial fire (for they too were stones).
But they were usurpers, and in time the men of the tribes played treason upon the stone and rolled it into this clammy nightmare cave where loping hags rake it with their bone-white dripping talons to keep the lengths down. The waters of the aquifer set loose by the dimming of the garden began to pour past the rock in eternal retreat and thus he has been much diminished, the old laws all but washed away, his hulking form shrunken like a prized head.
He wants revenge and will say as much. The party finds him half-submerged and crooked in waist-high water. He will speak to them in terms of their strange missions, for time and erosion have humbled him. He will offer to unlock the Angels’ greatest treasure for the party, or whatever elsehe can give or promise to remove him from this grinding hell. Two could roll him, four could carry him. He describes the treasure of the Anomites; a great golden spear with spirals of coral etched like ibex horns curling to the base and at the top a conic mound of outré ichor bought at blood-price from otherworldly outlaws when the garden first fell. This burbling pile is an opaque, sunny blue like tropical waters and is priceless beyond priceless to any who would know the places where the incompatible incomparable matter of universes intersect and misalign themselves. The stone will offer to use what power it has left to unlock the spear from its moorage, for the spear can be used to destroy the angels for good. This is true in a broad sense.
When the spear is removed from its docket, a great burning sigil silently appears above anearby mountaintop. The livid, star-fusion bars of blinding, steam-wreathed light form an esoteric, angular eye which glares down on the valley of its betrayal, for this is a manifestation of the Angels’ master and the removal of their spear has unhidden them. The mountain weeps like bloody wax beneath the burning eye, a lava lament for lost children.
The valley heats horrifically as the burning eye bathes it in macro-microwave which flash-focuses about the bones of the warlocks, His marrow superheating sight blasting their bones like alabaster shrapnel through ragged flesh and fabric, remnants flopping like spongiform aquatic animals. A burning blasting pillar-ray erupts from the starlight iris of the burning eye and goes raking through the valley rocks and what is left of garden stone goes blasting wide beneath the pulse of godly mighty thunder-wrath, a beam of vengeance long denied. This superpowered electrolaseris like a thousand bolts of lightning woven together into a constant strand and demolishes all discrete forms in the valley.
That is the punishment of mortals. About the Anomites grow shimmering and then all-consuming vortices; localized gravitational axes that slowly and with relish twist the Anomites into coiled ropes, barely-recognizable ridges of color and texture denoting what had been where, now wrapping tape for their horrifically constricted and elongated bodies. The vortices of the burning eye wrap these angel-coils about each other into a great multicolored beehive of twisted material which it then turns its electrolaser upon and sears into a molten bundle of inconstant colors and alternatingly clinging and weeping materials. The Anomites will remain in this bundle as it cools, and there they shall experience the full rigor of the Burning Eye’s justice as their trained, insatiable hunger can meet no peace.
There they shall fuse and harden and experience a long, slow death of starvation and calcification, and their fading essences shall not be captured by their home universe. This woven, spiral-bodied cask of angel flesh shall be of immeasurable worth to any who study mysterious science or the divine.
Players need to face d4 deadly challenges each to survive this cleansing, such as staggering through superheated air, lifting burning boulders from the way to shelter, dropping behind crushed masonry and rolling to put out one’s burning clothes, rushing to a blasted Warlock and using his burble-boiling gore-slicked corpse as a fireshield, diving from the way of an armed collapsing warrior statue, and evading the very beam of the Burning Eye.
Once the last of the Anomites have been twisted into their barrel-form, the great electrolaser will dissipate and the burning eye will grow translucent before disappearing, bathing the charnel valley in night once more.
After this, if the stone has not been destroyed it will relax and go dormant unless the GM can think of something he’d really like to use it for. For those interested, the rock was once a forge chimera who spent a day and a night immersed in molten gold and emeralds; his siphoned ashes became the rock. This was long ago.
Engraving is general across the walls of the six buildings.
Stony star-shapes summoned from a dawning sky-vortex, blood sacrifice upon the pitch.
Male figures ten feet tall hand-in-hand with women half their size. Serpents lazily overlooking asymmetric lovemaking in the orchards.
The moment of carving when the giants scooped away their own genitals as one.
The destruction of whole walled cities, a sprouting of form, a transformation among the great ones. Cities laid on the table. People standing on the rooftops agape at the giant sitting down to eat. Houses cut in two, cross-sectioned with cutlery.
The building of ships, stages, sets where men are ground like wheat. The first floodlights clicking on above sawdust blood-bowers to-be. The unearthing of the scorpions; a flood of them being led into the Garden.
Many brides perished in those first days of horror. Some of heartbreak, some of hemlock, some, finally, upon the table. But some remain.
They were pushed beneath the garden near the waters that once washed them and their quarters given over to the strange animals bred by the Anomites as ammunition.
They wander here in the funnels between deadroot and foundation where the vines which the waters snaked past to caress the garden’s thigh are now poisoned by spite and thirst. For the brides who remain here have not forgotten the solar caress which they once knew, though the angels have forgotten them. So near the mother of rains these women have not perished but their subterranean yearning has warped them into clomping hags just as it has twisted the roots of the poisonous coils of thorns.
The Crones are still massively sympathetic to the Anomites and their people; they remember the days when the Hanging Gardens were built for them. They believe the Anomites will remember them yet. They are aware many women did not survive the fall. They are unaware of the Anomites’ self-emasculation.
They wander these caverns and carry poisoned pins which inflame wounds. They will hang you on poisoned thorns and torment you with their pins for threatening their angels.
Marching down the valley from this gehenna is a column of five hundred men.
They are clad in hooded black tunics girt with leathern cross-straps bearing sun-discs of gold bleeding with gemslivers laid between the radial veins of light like pools of stained glass wine beneath fallen limbs and wings.
Their arms, calves and chests shine like wavetops with golden plate and scale. On closer inspection, this has been somehow bonded to their actual skin. It cannot be removed without removing the skin.
Tiny gold and silver chains hang like silky spiderwebs between fastnesses set into their chests and shoulders and slinking back and forth along their lengths go tiny statues; graven sphalerite icons of women in gowns, old men writing at desks, clumps of children. The things these men no longer see.
Tucked in broad belts are slithering flamberge daggers, iron question marks with alabaster pommels linked to necklaces by delicate chains.
They have their red rawhide calfskin gloves tucked beneath their belts. Some belts are buffalo fur, others the witch-weird flesh of river snails.
They wear armored torcs and have lengths of canvas twisted around daily servings of tobacco, a linen chain of balls hanging about the neck. Their white teeth are studded with black chew.
The straps of their sandals wind up their legs like parched and undead vines, but some are lined with glittering snakeskin or lengthy climbing caterpillars of buffalo fur.
Red sheets of corded twine broaden here and shimmer there across their bodies, discrete strands bobbing as they move their shoulders.
Some wear catfurs across their shoulders beneath their hoods, tails hanging down the back or arm.
They walk with staves that have unique hafts but uniform cylindrical sockets atop them. One staff might be ivory and notched with cinnabar fire descending through a milky sky, while another is alabaster with jade notching throughout like platforms of grass. A third is a glossy purple metal like a flutelike decanter of wine. And so forth.
Each man has two dozen thin cylinders hanging about him. Some clatter from apostle bandoliers draped around their bodies, others clink round the hems of their tunics like wind chime tassels, others are clasped to the lengths of their limbs by black bindings to turn sword blows. Some have thin gold line-etchings of trees writ deep into their lacquered surfaces, others are bony enamel and writhe with obsidian inkstains bearing bloodstain apples, others are wrapped in sapphire snakeskin and have actual snake heads blinking at the tips, and others are rough sandstone sarcophagi that riot with hidden multitudes within. These cylinders may be slotted into their staves and sent whirling about the party with gasping detonations of unearthly payloads. See Appendix 6: Fruits of the Garden for the most common types of warlock grenade.
The soldiers joyously sing a funerary dirge as they march; ancient language expertise reveals that it is about the death of one’s friends on the battlefield, with the porters murmuring over their corpses in disbelief. It is a boast of the horrors of war.
They are marching to one of their wild slave raids. Alas the people are wrong about this. This is wishful thinking. They do not enslave their captives.
Above you in the reddened clouds there are occasional flickers of darkness. These are warlocks who glide the arid winds on wicker wings stretched with spiderskin.
There he lays a black-boned skeleton swaddled in what remains of a midnight-blue raiment bound fast around his crown by an iron-girt circlet studded with lapis lazuli. Across his chest is a starry nebula of gemstones set in silver, a triptych of treasure hinged about his shoulders and lain atop him like the law tablet of a geode.
Around his bony wrists are white gold bracelets in four quarters around fat dollops of ruby segmenting the monorail. They are bound by tiny gold chains; this was how he closed his eyes, wrists clasped in the high finery of the Anomite age.
The waters wait, dark and hidden with congested magic.
They curl about themselves soft and azure glowing within rich and warm soil beneath the fallow planters of their fallen gardens. This is where the waters have built a bower in which to lay, a place of richness in an ocean of sand. They dream of the sun and sky that once made them glitter, now cut off on the other side of the Garden’s wall. The waters look to the four winds and wait to meet once more such a desire as once inspired them in times of cool spring. They bore fruit for the love of angels and womankind, and this valley was a bedsheet for their rapture. Alas the hearts of angels as men are inconstant and when blood began to soil the sweet streams of the sea snails the waters recoiled and recalled their melody from the sounding valley.
With nowhere to go in this vast desert, the waters fell back into the aquifer and wept while the garden hung with husks and the stones who had known dancing feet cracked beneath the weight of their bereavement.
A purple candelabra writ with white engravings, places where the paint has been peeled away to show the white wax wherein there are symbols of universal rebirth, for few things will survive the closing and the opening but one can step outside the galaxy by the incandescent ekembrites instilled in the antediluvian fat of this preconstructed candle. It will entrap you in an alternate energy form and things will be lost in your reassembly but perhaps an element of your consciousness will survive, for that is the only thing somewhat translatable across universes- but even then information is corrupted.
When you burn this candelabra and sit in its center upon a small steel dais set between the candles, you will be entwined and perforated by the mites of the steel mist and writ into energy currentsimperceptible to mortals of this dimension; you will be spun into the systematic energetic undercurrents of another universe in a way that is able to keep your consciousness more or less consecutive by locating a set of reoccurring energy streams that are compatible with your pattern. Your location will be held by the mites until it is time for you to return to this universe.
Roll a d20:
1: 71 hours
2-10: d20 years
11-19: d100 x d100 years
d20: d100 x 1M years
When you reenter this universe your consciousness will erase the consciousness of another being of your species who is nearest the place of your departure and you will occupy their body until its natural death.
If there is no suitable host available, for example if you utilized the candelabra to escape an extinction event, you will be held in a buffer- an energy entrapment pattern in a suitable host such as a star- until there evolves an organism capable of hosting your re-insertion.
Information corruption is inevitable in this process. Roll a d20 for effects:
1-5: -2d20 IQ
6-10: Retrograde amnesia
11-14: Amygdalian corruption: Extremely poor impulse control and lack of fear
15-18: Hippocampal corruption: Extreme furtiveness and neuroticism
19: Pattern breach: entities rewrite your personality for their purposes or install a backdoor or spy.
20: Left-body paralysis
Naturally this is one way to escape death.
Black musculata, arms and legs. Porcelain wings and volcanic claws, eight sapphire eyes piercing a milky helm, obsidian shard-blades flange its crown.
A gossamer white robe clinging to fatless, fleshless gifts of snakeskin-wrapped muscle. A straining, skinless head, ivory coins upon the eyes, for once this creature conspired to die. A golden wreath about sunken temples.
In ribcage hangs an ambergris brazier whose silkclouds snake between spice-speckled bones.
Plates of ivory, plates of jet in harlequin diamond round him set. Red eyes gleam past a twinkling mask held before his face on a pair of little arms from his upper chest, one jet and one ivory.
A palanquin his own four legs wrapped regally in crimson cape held hand-in-hand before his chest, a lace of gold brocade an inch from every bangled lip. He lays against a seatback throne of velvet pierced with brazen studs, it balanced on his rearmost thighs with oaken slats on femur set. He is a howdah and a burden-beast, a puppet hand and his own priest.
Tales of the Warlock-raiders of Anomie describe sorcerous staffs of many powers.
Indeed. They have many means of capturing you for the blood pits or the tablecloth.
There are three categories of staffshell: dumbfire, airburst and discarding-sabot.
Seer’s stone: Dumbfire crystal linked to a Warlock’s glass eye.
Fin-stabilized discarding sabot serpent shell: This is the extreme long-range Warlock Grenade due to the lightness of its warhead. A snake encased to the neck in a rigid, fin-stabilized tube. The user adjusts the snake-release range by moving a sliding knob up or down the staff to set the detonation distance before firing. When the missile has reached 90% of its range, a gunpowder fuse (set by the slide) detonates and frees the enraged serpent to strike at whoever it lands near. This round is also useful as a close-range chemical weapon because the serpent’s venom sac can be squeezed with a thumb, ejecting a spray; this can be employed once a day or so assuming the serpent has been fed. The fin-stabilized discarding-sabot concept would be a valuable prize for city-state engineers.
Scorpiorion shell: Airburst round loading dozens of small megavenomous scorpions. Their hemotoxic stings bloat up extremities to 2-3 sizes their original mass, drooping, useless, red, and necrotizing into the bloodstream. This shell uses the aforementioned sliding knob to set the scorpiorion shell’s detonation range fuse before firing.
Agrippan beeswax stinger grenade: The fruits of the hanging garden’s beekeepers, this alchemical wonder bursts in the air and sprays a misting of molten beeswax over the target area. Once exposed to oxygen the beeswax bonds at the molecular level with whatever it touches and gradually sets into a ceramic as hard as stone over the course of about a minute. Simple water will prevent the bonding process if applied within 30 seconds, though this was a sacrifice Anom’s enemies were often unwilling to make. This is the origin of the golden-armored bodies of the Warlocks; it is not gold or gilded, but hard-set Agrippan beeswax permanently bound into their flesh. This is a sacrifice; the unnatural and interruptive grafts bother the warriors all day.
Armor piercing discarding sabot love dart penetrator: The love dart of a psychoactive river snail from the time of the hanging gardens. It is sharp-tipped and somewhat rigid, but bendy enough that you could use it to strangle a foe from behind. The dart drips in anticipation. If it hits, d4 snails begin gestation inside the target, emitting megadoses of hallucinogen intended to incapacitate the target while keeping them alive during the three-day gestation period. While the hallucinogen is technically nontoxic, it will gradually psychologically dissolve the target.
5 minutes: the victim begins to see the material world disassociated from his or her personal frame or schema; instead of seeing the world in an instrumental way, the victim simply sees the matter of the objects in question and must focus very hard to know what to do with them and what their context even is.
8 hours: the victim will have developed a radically open personality.
24 hours: the victim will only barely recognize familiar forms; they will be capable of gardening unsupervised, and that’s about it.
48 hours: the victim is completely psychically dissolved and able to respirate but not swallow
72 hours: the snail worms its way out of the host’s rectum.
The only way to stop the process is the surgical removal of the embryonic snails. The surgeon should be careful as the snail ichor carries the hallucinogen.
An alternative round is the love dart flechette canister round, which contains a bundle of love darts from sea snails younger than the ones which standard darts are derived from. When these canister rounds burst, a shotgun blast of small love darts hits the target area. Each delivers only a single embryonic sea snail rather than the d4 from a mature penetrator.
Diamond dust round: The cloud from this airburst round perforates lungs and degloves eyes.
He is the Honey Knight.
He was a mighty mason taken captive on the dunes. His test in the Playsets was a driftwood castle set afire, with children tied among the highest branches. The mason rescued one but couldn’t reach the other. He dragged his ward through the fire and the flame but was horrifyingly burnt. He is beloved of the Anomites now, who fused his sloughing flesh with the musculata, mask, greaves and braces of gold honey plate from the bees of paradise. He cannot speak any longer, but the boy can tell the party about him.
He despises the mutilated angels. He cares only for the boy he rescued, who was spared from the table using the sole wish granted the mason by the Anomites for his performance.
The Warlocks live on caravan raiding. This is where their bounty is kept. Aching moats of rice greet the party when they enter, bags blasted open by being flung on the floor spilling alps of shivering snow-spikes, here and there bales of barley by the bushel wound up in twine and hairy like filth-matted dogs, buckets of beans like ten thousand inverse eyes all distended pupil with but a fleck of white to bear the burden, sausages rotating in space like medals to be contemplated, pears on pears in baskets pushing stem down into mottled flesh like sister-sabotaging bucket crabs, whole heaps of jerky on bloodstained butcher paper, their innermost reaches bearing an ephemeral glow like the last light in the eyes of a dying life, sweet potatoes with their skin split in transit looking like autumn in the earth, dumplings losing face and deflating before the onslaught of pretzel sticks tearing them gaping and shivering to spill a salty brew from their innards inappropriately over the crystalline skin of ripe apples whose fragrance dominates all, a spring victor, orchard king, ringing word of plenty over the meek voices of subtler cohorts. The Warlocks could bathe in their grain, riding ass-first down dusty piles of oats or diving nosefirst into vast quivering casks of strawberry jam, swinging about on whole banana bunches like lemonade chandeliers, or climbing two-by-two vast ropes of licorice slimy and dank like the pseudopods of a giant spider’s nasal parasite. The giant erotic ass of a plum. The butter bounty of coffee beans, mudstaining cocoa lumps like unicorn turds, calamari tentacles that point accusingly over the ice, you, you, you.
Waist-deep in water is a stone. It was once tall and majestic, a tablet of law for a thousand tiny tribes who once stood in harmony beholding his kneeling shoulders. When the angels came the people besought him, “o stone of worth and prophecy, give our bodies to the angels that we may host the gift of God.” And the stone did as they asked and gave union to seven men of the tribes and the seven angels lit with celestial fire (for they too were stones).
But they were usurpers, and in time the men of the tribes played treason upon the stone and rolled it into this clammy nightmare cave where loping hags rake it with their bone-white dripping talons to keep the lengths down. The waters of the aquifer set loose by the dimming of the garden began to pour past the rock in eternal retreat and thus he has been much diminished, the old laws all but washed away, his hulking form shrunken like a prized head.
He wants revenge and will say as much. The party finds him half-submerged and crooked in waist-high water. He will speak to them in terms of their strange missions, for time and erosion have humbled him. He will offer to unlock the Angels’ greatest treasure for the party, or whatever elsehe can give or promise to remove him from this grinding hell. Two could roll him, four could carry him. He describes the treasure of the Anomites; a great golden spear with spirals of coral etched like ibex horns curling to the base and at the top a conic mound of outré ichor bought at blood-price from otherworldly outlaws when the garden first fell. This burbling pile is an opaque, sunny blue like tropical waters and is priceless beyond priceless to any who would know the places where the incompatible incomparable matter of universes intersect and misalign themselves. The stone will offer to use what power it has left to unlock the spear from its moorage, for the spear can be used to destroy the angels for good. This is true in a broad sense.
When the spear is removed from its docket, a great burning sigil silently appears above anearby mountaintop. The livid, star-fusion bars of blinding, steam-wreathed light form an esoteric, angular eye which glares down on the valley of its betrayal, for this is a manifestation of the Angels’ master and the removal of their spear has unhidden them. The mountain weeps like bloody wax beneath the burning eye, a lava lament for lost children.
The valley heats horrifically as the burning eye bathes it in macro-microwave which flash-focuses about the bones of the warlocks, His marrow superheating sight blasting their bones like alabaster shrapnel through ragged flesh and fabric, remnants flopping like spongiform aquatic animals. A burning blasting pillar-ray erupts from the starlight iris of the burning eye and goes raking through the valley rocks and what is left of garden stone goes blasting wide beneath the pulse of godly mighty thunder-wrath, a beam of vengeance long denied. This superpowered electrolaseris like a thousand bolts of lightning woven together into a constant strand and demolishes all discrete forms in the valley.
That is the punishment of mortals. About the Anomites grow shimmering and then all-consuming vortices; localized gravitational axes that slowly and with relish twist the Anomites into coiled ropes, barely-recognizable ridges of color and texture denoting what had been where, now wrapping tape for their horrifically constricted and elongated bodies. The vortices of the burning eye wrap these angel-coils about each other into a great multicolored beehive of twisted material which it then turns its electrolaser upon and sears into a molten bundle of inconstant colors and alternatingly clinging and weeping materials. The Anomites will remain in this bundle as it cools, and there they shall experience the full rigor of the Burning Eye’s justice as their trained, insatiable hunger can meet no peace.
There they shall fuse and harden and experience a long, slow death of starvation and calcification, and their fading essences shall not be captured by their home universe. This woven, spiral-bodied cask of angel flesh shall be of immeasurable worth to any who study mysterious science or the divine.
Players need to face d4 deadly challenges each to survive this cleansing, such as staggering through superheated air, lifting burning boulders from the way to shelter, dropping behind crushed masonry and rolling to put out one’s burning clothes, rushing to a blasted Warlock and using his burble-boiling gore-slicked corpse as a fireshield, diving from the way of an armed collapsing warrior statue, and evading the very beam of the Burning Eye.
Once the last of the Anomites have been twisted into their barrel-form, the great electrolaser will dissipate and the burning eye will grow translucent before disappearing, bathing the charnel valley in night once more.
After this, if the stone has not been destroyed it will relax and go dormant unless the GM can think of something he’d really like to use it for. For those interested, the rock was once a forge chimera who spent a day and a night immersed in molten gold and emeralds; his siphoned ashes became the rock. This was long ago.
Divine madness.
ReplyDeleteThis is very close to how I first encountered this piece. It's wonderful. I want to run it just to read the passages about the burning eye, the electrolaser, and the destruction of discrete form out loud to someone. I'm trying to figure out how best to work it in to what I have going on in my campaign. I've recently left myself a lot of room to take my players to strange places, so it's going to happen, it's just a matter of when. I'll happily report back afterwards.
ReplyDeleteThank you Dan. Please let me know because I don’t know when I’ll get a chance to run this
DeleteThis is fantastic! Congratulations!
ReplyDeleteThanks very much Ioannis. I believe that these passages can impart the essence of the Gardens and so I wanted to post them outside of the necessary complete ordered structure of an adventure in order for them to elementary express the experience intended for the adventure. Hopefully that way I can give something to the reader who doesn’t have time to read an RPG adventure, doesn’t need one or doesn’t have the inclination
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