New Religious Frameworks for RPGs

Summary: Here I posit several religious frameworks which may be novel to RPGs, and lay out several classifications for polytheism.

I am doing this because I am planning to post a maximalist gonzo weird fiction city-state generator soon. It is intended to produce a home city for one's player character. Each city-state is intended to come with massive implications for the character’s culture and life experience.

These religions plug into that city-state generator.

Index

    Reism

Experientialist Reism

Experimentalist Reism

Exploratory Reism

Inhabitationist Reism

Metamorphic Reism

Refiner Reism

-Individualist Reism

-Specist Reism

-Planetary Reism

-Sociocultural Reism

Transcendentalist Reism

-Occult Reism

-Theistic Reism

Vier Reism

    Monadism

Monadic Accretionism

Radiant Monadism

    Hero Societies

Hero Cult

Hero Caste

Hero Lodge

Hero Company

    Millenarian Esoterica

    Xenotheosis

    Polytheism

Affective Polytheism

Archetypal Polytheism

Exemplar Polytheism

Hyperspecialized Polytheism

Psychosyncretic Polytheism

Reism 

There is a Universal Consciousness underlying time and space.

Human beings are manifestations of the UC.

We are God born on earth, but stripped of universality and made particular.

We have forgotten all that we knew before our birth, but we can feel the presence of the greater whole in the transcendent and in other people. 

What is intended by the UC? That is the great question.

Reist Schools of thought

    Experientialist Reism

The UC is attempting to experience as much as possible about the world. Humans can be conceptualized as the UC’s fingertips, tongue, eyeballs, nerves and so forth.

A practitioner may believe that he or she should experience as much of everything as possible (most often pleasure, knowledge and aesthetic experience), or they may feel that they have a specific phenomena which they are meant to receive as a bellwether for the UC.

    Experimentalist Reism

Each practitioner believes that one has a very specific purpose resting upon a theory or proposition and that one must discover and enact it.

    Exploratory Reism

Humans are the UC’s way of mapping out physical (or conceptual or metaphysical) existence. This might be the duty of every man, woman and child, or it might be for a chosen few whom the rest of the human race supports like a pit crew.

    Inhabitationist Reism

The damned moderates of the Reists. 

The UC seeks to inhabit reality. We are its means.

The conscience is the voice of the UC. It speaks for your circumstances, so it is ok if it says something different from someone else. It’s ok if there’s conflict: think of this like the friction and strain of gears that are turning inside of a harmonious mechanism.

There is pointless strife, suffering and deceit among mankind first because the human chassis malfunctions, but also because faulty first principles have developed that we attend to rather than the voice of the UC. The conscience is really the common soul that we all share; that we all are.

    Metamorphic Reism

The goal of the UC is to shape the physical universe into a new form: a physical superstructure, some kind of energetic node system, or into a completely new phase of matter.

    Refiner Reism

The UC intends to refine the human race, the Earth, or human society.

Refiner schools of thought:

-Individualist Refiners seek to improve themselves in particular ways (e.g. athleticism or self-mutilation)

-Specist Refiners seek to enhance all humans (e.g. eugenics, health and wellness programs, or occult genetic modification)

-Planetary Refiners seek to turn the world into a kind of beacon, factory, engine or stockpile (physical or spiritual)

-Sociocultural Refiners seek to bring humanity under an ideology of social conduct intended to channel humanity’s spiritual energy such that the UC can directly manifest, or so that it can fulfill its true purpose via the network.

    Transcendental Reism

The purpose of mankind is to travel to another dimension.

This will transmit the packet of essence contained in the person to a new universe as is appropriate.

Most Transcendentalists believe that this happens during death, though Occult Transcendentalists feel that the situation has been misapprehended and that humans must discover how to physically transcend the universe during life. As soon as that happens we can serve as the UC’s conduit to other universes, with everyone going over once they’ve reached maturity, or most people ASAP with a small stay-behind vanguard to continually produce more people, or only a few chosen elites at a time.

Why are manifestations of the UC going to other universes?

-Perhaps there is an energy ecosystem that Universal Consciousnesses are part of, and for an unknown reason they MUST transmit small portions of consciousness between them.

-Perhaps the UC is colonizing another universe, one that is empty or inhabited by hostile or Undesirable Consciousness(es).

-Perhaps the UC is practicing sacrifice, or is even suicidal, and is giving portions to itself to higher powers, or carving them off and tossing them into the void (its equivalent of into the pond or over the fence).

-Perhaps the UC is a kind of natural resource, like an oilfield, and is percolating naturally into other universes the way groundwater fertilizes a field.

-Perhaps the portions of the UC are used to explore, link together, or conquer foreign universes.

Many Transcendental Reists believe that this world’s religions and ideologies are the memetic magnetism of conduits and gates to other universes.

Whichever religion a person follows determines what universe that person’s consciousness energy will enter upon their death.

Each of the UC’s manifestations is intended for a particular universe, and the call that one feels to a deity or way of life is a manifestation of that universe drawing the supplicant towards it.

As a result, many Transcendental Reists practice a theistic religion, or feel that they should but haven’t yet figured out which one they’re meant. These are Theistic Reists.

Atheists are either meant for a specific kind of universe or are malformed vessels which will helpfully return to the UC when they die.

Some Theistic Reists feel that we should shape the constellation of cosmoses by promoting certain religions and ways of life, while preventing the spread of others. This may require the presumption of a view of morality privileged by one’s manifestation in physical reality; that the UC is a kind of animal intelligence or well of consciousness energy.

They don’t want to bolster universes which would take a certain kind of person unless they serve as prisons for that form of energy.

    Vier Reism

The earth is a kind of game for the UC to play. It is like a single person is playing every character in an MMO and experiencing each one in sequence, or all at once somehow.

Many who believe in Vier Reism seek out an enterprise to compete in: mountaineering, sports, business, seduction, war, and so forth. Most often they pursue an enterprise for which they are well-adapted, so this can manifest as things like stamp collecting or mass murder.

It is a criticism of Reism that there is no specific mechanism preventing war. If humans are all instantiations of the UC, we can kill each other freely, being freed into the enlightened whole upon death. Warlike Vier Reists embrace this at least tacitly, but more common among the Reist family is the view that the UC’s enterprise is harmed by damaging individual manifestations if they haven’t become totally pathological; that every human is made of the divine.

---

There was once a sect that held that people were probably accidental manifestations of a nonsapient, animalistic, or baby-like UC; this idea lacked motive power, however, and the sect ended up dying out.

Monadism

The Monad is like a spiritual sun that is outside time and space, or is a plane of infinite power. 

Human beings contain a kind of conscious spirit-energy.

We are all aggregating to the Monad. We can feel this in our constant attraction to the transcendent, which we fail to wholly define. This is the Monad. 

Our job is to become as aligned with the Monad as possible. We must prepare to join it in life as a kind of enlightened transcending saint, or in death when we submit our accumulated, refined and purified energy to the Monad.

Monadic Schools of Thought

    Monadic Accretionism

You should seek states of positive energy, which are evidence of the accumulation/purification/sacralization of one’s spirit energy. Seek to instantiate these states in others. Seek to mitigate and minimize useless suffering. It erodes spiritual energy.

The muscular manifestation of this is the cultivation of great health.

If you are more mystically-inclined, you can add meditation and elevated states involving ecstasy, singing and rejoicing to the point of visions and glossolalia.

The more we empower the Monad, the nearer to the living we bring the blissful paradisiacal divine.

    Radiant Monadism

You should torture and/or kill people to bolster the Monad, particularly people who have reached the likely height of their spiritual power (heroes, charismatic archpriests, famed industrialists, saints, lawgiver-kings), or those who are thought to have uncorrupted or uncomplicated spiritual essences (children, virgins, pacifists, engineers, members of certain spiritual sects).

Your extreme sensations while you do these things are the radiance of the Monad as It receives your gifts.

You will join the Monad someday, but for now you can personally do more to empower It than the average person and so you should survive as long as you can.

Through this sacrifice, you refresh and enhance the spiritual vibrancy and vitality of everything that exists, for the Monad is the center of all energy.

Hero Societies

Worshippers are brought up in or are inducted into societies dedicated to mythological figures.

Each hero society provides models for emulation. Some societies are private matters, others are tight-knit and hereditary social structures that determine what role an individual will have in society.

Forms:

Cult

Caste

Lodge

Company

Figures:

Hero

Martyr

Saint

Statesman

Originator

Crop

Animal (as food or model for emulation)

Natural phenomenon

    Hero Cults

These exist within a culture but they are not the culture’s primary manner of social organization.

    Example:

Starling & Shrike ancestor detective spirit societies. These manifest as dinner clubs, discourses held at shrines, and prayer meetings where they may attempt to commune with and channel the ancestral detective depending on the nature of their faith.

    Hero Castes

Children are born into societal stratums conceptualized around mythological heroes.

    Example:

The builderhero caste in the Empire of the Twin Canals has become dominant by erecting a manifold of monumental structures, but their influence is eroding in the age of explosive shells.

The builderhero is said to have heard of wind from the fisherhero. He built a fastness for the fisherhero in exchange for food.

He heard of lions from the planterhero so he built a wall around the garden, but not around the fields. It is the shepherdhero to defend those.

The builderhero is enduring, patient, and extends his welcome to all so long as they abide by his code. This is critical in their hurricane-prone archipelago. They must render him a portion of their produce. 

Only the shepherdhero paid him no tribute, and only the shepherdhero is barred from his house.

The builders of the builders, the slave caste, worship a figure of non-attachment.

    Hero Company

Members serve in some kind of productive enterprise dedicated to an appropriate figure.

    Example:

The Anarcho-Syndicalist religion in the City of Fasciatus.

This will be stamped out should the City of Leagues ever form an Anarcho-Syndicalist empire.

The Union of Red Copperleg: Red Copperleg was the spirit of the Milkweed Bootleggers (now the Distillers’ Union). He haunted the pipes and alembics, whistling when the brew needed love or whispering with the vapor of methanol. He is channeled at the Seance of the White Lightning.

The Union of Old Barnabas: The salty ancestral foreman of the Longshoreman’s Union is a figure of worship for foremen as such.

A “union of foremen” is an extremely controversial enterprise. It helps the Unions coordinate, but it also smells of an upper class and an undue adornment for the Longshoreman’s Union.

The Union of Mother Milkweed: The Union of Mothers competes amongst itself to bear as many workers as possible. Heroic effort is required to meet the new production quotas and the city must have more helping hands if the work is ever to be finished. 

Mother Milkweed is said to have bore twenty-nine children, taking only a single day off between birth and conception and only then on holidays. Her children formed the twenty-nine unions.

The Union of Brother Hartman: The Teamster, Brother Hartman, once drove through the sky with the gold and silver plundered by Legs Domino, ancestor of the Bank Wreckers’ Union, from the unfathomable industrialists between the stars.

As humanity’s understanding of the sun and moon has evolved, Brother Hartman has become less of a literal figure. This metaphorization has led to a crisis of identity amongst the Teamsters’ Union. The Revisionists say he’s a model for timely delivery. The Old Guard say he’s real and that the Teamsters shouldn’t accept the rates and workloads that they do if Brother Hartman isn’t a serious part of the cosmology.

As such, an undersecretary has taken up astrological occultism so as to hunt for entities between the stars. He will find what he’s looking for.

    Hero Lodge

Lodgemembers live apart from society, or from the other lodges if society is made up lodges.

Some take after animals. Members of a cheetah lodge can act as ambush predators in hunts, wars, or stock manipulations, depending on the society.

Warrior lodgemembers may live apart from the women and their parents until they reach a certain condition (e.g. over 30, taken a scalp, or had one’s first prophetic vision and a quest); a beaver lodge is committed the construction of watermills or hydroelectric dams; a lodge for the psychopath god is a prison, but in war its members are parachuted into enemy territory as ranger berserks on a terminal chevauchee.

An agrarian society may have lodges emulating edible foods; members seek to emulate their foodstuff in order to bring it into their larder. Thus the grain lodge is solar and outdoorsy, the boar lodge is aggressive and paranoid, the cherry lodge is sweet and sultry, and the grapevine lodgers are lazy drunkards.

    Example:

The Affidavit Spider Lodge. These hunters gradually transform into spiders the longer they go without eating. Generally they begin their fast as soon as a hunt is called, and over the course of the next several days they develop arachnid characteristics.

End of Day 1: The hunter has developed a second set of humanlooking eyes, a hemolymph-based hydraulic system in his legs, and full-body fur with setules and calamistrum.

End of Day 2: The hunter has developed a third set of eyes, functional spinnerets, and venomous mandibles. The venom is paralytic they kill you by wrapping you in silk and then drenching you with digestive enzymes before a ritual feast. This venom is also anti-apoptotic so even if you escape after a bite you will likely develop leukemia.

End of Day 3: The hunter develops a final set of eyes, additional sets of arms and legs, complete radial symmetry in the limbs, and barbed urticating bristles which can be blasted into foes.

If the hunters haven’t gotten you by Day 3 they will usually give up and find some other food because at the end of day 4 they will lose their humanity. They return to normal after they eat, leaving behind exuviae.

Millenarian Esoterica

This is the belief that specific conduct will bring about an unspecified but transcendent final state for the believers or for all humanity.

The more these behaviors are practiced, the faster this utopia will come about.

It is rife in industrial areas suffering from lead and mercury contamination, and in societies which have been subjugated or otherwise crushed and now hope for an end to the world.

Xenotheosis

Direct rule by an antediluvian, extracosmic, protocosmic, phenomenological, or inexplicable entity that represents itself as the agent of a divinity, or simply a/the powerful divinity itself. This may or may not be true.

Polytheism

There are five types of polytheism represented here.

Affective Polytheism: The divines embody affective states that command human behavior.

Archetypal Polytheism: The divines embody universally-recurring figures in human experience.

Exemplar Polytheism: The divines embody important or enduring societal roles.

Hyperspecialized Polytheism: Exemplar Polytheism where each god has an Archetypal overlay.

Psychosyncretic Polytheism: Archetypal Polytheism where each god is flavored by an Affective state.

    Affective Polytheism

A pantheon of d20 deities roughly embodying affective states, example list with associated symbols:

Rage (spear, bomb, broken bottle)

Lust (bower)

Envy (an abacus)

Pride (a vast hat)

Generosity (a beggar king)

Self-Abnegation (a man with a shoe stuck in his mouth)

Ennui (a well)

Interest (lightning)

Diligence (a forge)

Hedonia (wine and mushrooms)

Sadism (a deer with a broken neck)

Love (a hermaphrodite)

Gratitude (a garden)

Awe (the priest of the gods)

Attention (the eye)

Prudence (chess set with hourglass)

Bravery (an Atlas figure; a rain of arrows)

Greed (a dog fight)

Sloth (a sloth)

Solidarity (a nation)

You may reroll results of 1; a society with no duality in its value structure might go off the rails, however you can also structure this concept however you like.

Perhaps a society with one god, a sleeping god, has a mythology focused on energetically performing the activities required to awaken the god or give it inspiring dreams which manifest in reality.

A lone Goddess of Lust may be conceived of as a devouring mother that must be propitiated or held off by a strict, continent, and monogamous way of life. Perhaps the society has flower wars to transform the God of Ennui into the Hero God. Up to you!

If you keep a result of 1, record the city-state as Monotheistic.

    Archetypal Polytheism

A pantheon of deities embodying the following characters and their associations.

Note that not all societies will have each one present, and there’s a great deal of variation in how their principles are acted out by societies. For example some states represent the Prince as a pacifist and the beast-slaying is metaphorical, but in another society he is the most successful conqueror in history.

Great King: The Lawgiver, Gardenbuilder, Bulwark, House of Light, Civilization

Great Mother: Giver of Good, Weaver of Blessings, Abundant Life, Sacrificer of the Prince into Legend

Tyrant: The Blind King, the Undead God, the Unsound Tower, Drought, Civilization

Sage: Initiator, Lanternbearer, Swordgiver

Devouring Mother: The Cradle of Grown Men, the Hater of Young Beauties, Aging, Disease, Poisonous Nature, Mother of Monsters, Cancer

The Shrewd Uncle: The Power Behind the Throne, the Wicked Vizier, the Mad Scientist, the Evil Genius, the Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Prince: Rescuer, Restorer, Explorer, Slayer of Beasts, Enricher of Friends, Self-Sacrificer, Leader, and He Who Turns Over the Garden

Princess: Tamer of Barbarians, Inspiration, the Beheader of Cowards, the Artist Who Makes Hard Hearts Remember Love

The Fates: The Forces of Causality Divorced from the Archetypal. Gatekeeper, Facilitator, Arbitrator, Culminator and Extinguisher

Agent of Chaos: Corruptor, Arsonist, Entropy, the Revealer, the Serpent in the Garden

The Friend who Reaches Across Darkness: Boon-Companion, Puller from the Pit, the Resurrection

Trickster: Cynic, Hedonist, Thief, Desire; the Chrysalis of Good and Evil

You can choose d12 of these deities or freely take all of them as a gestalt pantheon. These figures are suspiciously similar in the polytheism of many city-states which share common ancestors in prehistory. 

    Exemplar Polytheism

d12 deities roughly representing important, noteworthy and/or enduring societal functions, e.g.

Fisher God

Javelin God

Mother Goddess

Goddess of Rapprochement

Demonic Outlaw

Whispering Voice (for thieves, madmen, and those tortured by their conscience for good or ill)

    Psychosyncretic Polytheism

Archetypal Polytheism where each deity has come to be associated with an Affective state.

    Hyperspecialized Polytheism

Exemplar Polytheism where each deity is also assigned an Archetypal role (or their myths take on the valences of Archetypal roles). This normally comes about when a society has engaged in its current core economic activity for a thousand years or more, and specific enterprises or segments of society and their corresponding gods have become mythologically associated with specific Archetypal characters.

Artpunk Apéritif: Leonoct Lane

Summary: This is a peaceful commercial street in the prosperous mountaintop city-state of Starling & Shrike. You will find it to be a safe and quiet respite from a world of blood-soaked esoteric madness, antediluvian conspiracy and industrialized destruction.

I’m outlining this place because I want to present a location that contrasts as strongly as possible with the Artpunk and Starling & Shrike Detective adventure locations that I’ve already posted.

Relentless chaos is exhausting and uninterrupted normality causes restlessness. You can arrange a trip to Leonoct Lane when the party is exhausted.

Here are some destinations for when they get restless:

Skychasm

The Gardens of Anomie

Silicasilk

The Panopticon of Bombaryx

The Dominion of Mandrake

The Bandit Tribes

Missions of Mercy

This city, Starling & Shrike, practices a form of state capitalism in which each youth must complete a 14-year agōgē to become a mercenary detective or state finance agent if he or she wishes to gain full citizenship. The graduate can do what he or she likes after graduation but most end up practicing their profession, paying dues to S&S in exchange for state services.

It is a cold, quiet, prosperous and remote city. It is built on a mountaintop and almost everything besides power, water, stone, ore and lumber is flown in by airplane.

It is an enterprise for the production of a maximally deadly and profitable form of mercenary for a world-age characterized by industrial aristocracy, efficacious esotericism, hinterland shamanic warlordism and animistic instantiation.

It is strict with its citizens when they are in the city and unforgiving towards its permanent residents. It tyrannical towards children undergoing their training.

The city's policy is structured such that you’re unlikely to encounter any kind of creature or enemy here. S&S detectives generally experience their violence elsewhere.

The city itself has many peaceful and prosperous places.

Leonoct Lane, for example. Take a walk down the lane and you will see the following: 

The Follies

A dark, winding restaurant.

The Nigel Grim Counting House

Detectives send coins from all over the world here.

River Island Butchery

A butcher shop supplied primarily by airplane.

Lionel Leonoct Library of Detection

The world's foremost reference library for detectives.

Archer Armatures

A pistolsmith specializing in the engraving of firearms.

Widow’s Walk

An apartment building favored by young detectives and working class permanent residents.

The Zugzwang

A chess club by day and a dancehall by night.

The Valerian Caracole Botanical Garden

A maze of trees with a tower-top greenhouse.

The Follies

You enter by the open kitchen and see a troupe of young men in shortsleeved shirts working diligently above cutting boards and frying pans around a central oven.

Spices and garnishes hang high upon the walls and open ice boxes of steak and seafood sit beneath the workspaces.

The entry hall shares a wall of wine with the kitchen and there are many little tables with delicate white tablecloths and chairs set at uneven angles so that diners aren’t squared up on each other adversarially.

There are little chairs and benches by the door and a woman from Diadem comes to greet you. She asks you how many and leads you into the dim, decorated tunnels of this place. 

The woman from Diadem leads you down a winding corridor set with many dressing screens behind which are an assortment of lustrous tables decked with tulips and wine. The curves of the Follies are unknowable in a single visit.

You can sit in the center off the hallway so that others may see your suit and your lady’s neckline, or in the confines of a shielded cubicle of dressing screens in the corner. Embroidered upon the screens are butterflies, shooting stars, garlands, dogs and vines, and there are paintings and photographs from the city’s history and the wilds of the world on the walls.

Each bathroom has an open secret. In the Men’s there are photos of naked women posed upon settees in boudoirs, and in the Women’s there are leonine portrait prints of powerful men in profile; a cleft-jawed condottiere in cuirass, a painted, brilliant-eyed bandit tribe chieftain, a young industrialist with a cocked eyebrow and a half-cocked smile, and a smoldering, bullet-scarred detective whose pale hair is tied back in a soldier’s queue. 

This place is a cafe by day and the sun pours through windows which are hooded by night. Espresso is served, and cortado, affogato, cappuccino, carafes of rich black coffee and little glasses of sweet white wine. The specialty is snowmelt, a cup of whipped cream with a splash of black coffee over the top. This most sober and republican delicacy is eaten with a long spoon.

The Nigel Grim Counting House

“Blow your cut?”

“Blew it to Nige.”

This is a counting house where monetary dues paid to Starling & Shrike are weighed, measured, assayed and sorted by the resident Finance Agent and his staff.

Coinage from around the world is stacked on tables in neat ziggurats or overflows from open drawers. The money is waiting to be logged, assessed and portioned off to the iron treasury beneath Council Hall.

S&S agents may enter this place freely even if they don’t have any business here. It’s thought very unlikely that an S&S agent will steal from this place, though S&S agents do occasionally break the law in preference to revealing their financial recklessness or failure to complete contracts.

A 9mm machine pistol is hanging holstered on a wall for the Finance Agent to use in defense of this place. This is an object of quiet amusement for detectives, who don’t usually even bother to carry inside S&S.

.999 gold bullion is the standard payment for state-sourced S&S contracts. Individual agents can take contracts for whatever reward they please, but S&S advancement dues can only be paid in gold and silver, or paper money from city-states with a gold or silver standard. 

These dues cover the agent’s attendance of state skill academies. The agent may also use his dues to requisition supplies, equipment, and services from the city such as specialized research reports and tutoring on subjects beyond what’s offered by the seasonal training courses.

Approved Currency

An ancient, peeling sign with the words “Council Hall” painted on it hangs from the ceiling over a table heaped with a great mass of currency approved for the treasury. This old sign stood in front of Council Hall for seventy five years and has been repurposed rather than decommissioned.

Bombaryx Guilder

Obverse: A ridgeline which is emitting Zs from its highest point. This commemorates a hill assault during the Unknown Islands War between Bombaryx and Mandrake where the defending aristocrat’s entire retinue was catatonic on heroin. 

Reverse: An image of a great, global machine with a mysterious output.

Diadem Gloriette

Obverse: Tower surrounded by upwards-facing lightning bolts. This is in celebration of the Navel of the Mount tower, which was built with extreme rapidity. 

Reverse: A pair of arms holding a bundle of towers like rolled-up blueprints.

Starling & Shrike Sterling

Obverse: An eye embraced by a laurel wreath. This is an S&S coin from the time when S&S still minted currency.

Reverse: A pyramid with buildings carved out of the tip; a stylized representation of the mountaintop.

Troutbridge Shiner

Obverse: This coin originally depicted Samuel Fishmonger, a Troutbridge founding father, dressed soberly in a stiff-collared jacket, halfruff and tricorn hat. It has been altered by a bandit tribe to suit its own leadership. They recut the surface of this coin to represent the visage of their chieftain Xoruthorax, whose tricorn has become a triple-spiked crown of horn, his ruff now a network of feathers, furs and animal tails, and in his newly-added hand he holds a petrified snake as a scepter commemorating his (pyrrhic) expedition into the Place of Things. His face has been ritually scarred with scrollwork gust-of-wind patterns and he sticks his thrice-cut tongue out in a warrior display, flexing it so that two of its tips point up and one points down. It is intended to lend him a serpentine aspect when he is viewed in a side profile. 

Reverse: An image of a bridge over a river; this has not been modified.

Vineforest Dame

Obverse: An hourglass superimposed over the borders of the Vineforest. This is a revanchist symbol indicating the former full domain of the Vineforest Dukes. Much of the Vineforest is currently held by the Red Charter Companies and the Free Cities of Tourmaline Gorge (who are also mutual enemies).

Reverse: A wild boar whose bristles and spikes are javelins.

Substandard Currency

A sign with a red X painted on it hangs from the ceiling over a table with a number of odd coins laid out side-by-side. This table is for substandard currency that has been disapproved for recirculation.

City of Leagues Assignat

A tin coin emblazoned with a twelve-pointed device; a central ring with six chains linked to little iron spheres. Naval star shot. The reverse of the coin is the same as the obverse but concave, as the image has simply been stamped through the tin like a bottlecap.

Great Loom Memoriam

This coin commemorates a feast in which the cities of Ascension, Archzenith, Diadem, Troutbridge and Great Loom agreed to make war against the Cynthian Empire. The heads of state are depicted raising swords together over a cornucopia. Great Loom is the least militant of these cities and this was a special event in its history.

The rear of this coin sports a mummified book in honor of Great Loom’s twin industries of weaving and bookbinding.

The coin has been debased by clipping. It should have a slightly wavy rim which can be detected by rolling it in the hands, but this is missing and the exterior has a uniform circumference. 

Cape Cittacotte Castellan

Obverse: A city’s outer walls with towering flames emerging from the city behind them. This symbol celebrates the Cape Cittacotte Renaissance.

Reverse: The face of Marsawa Lumar. She was a logistician, financier, and alliance-making matchmaker among the cities and tribes of the Heroön Coast.

This coin is a fourrée; a copper core with a wrapping of silver foil. Lumar's face has a deep scar across the cheek where a Finance Agent jabbed the coin with a dagger after weighing it in his hand. This revealed the coin’s true nature underneath a eutectic layer of alloyed copper and silver. It will be sent to a silversmith for melting down; the agent who sent it in will receive a small credit for the value of the silver.

Aleator Ivory

Unmarked ivory chips from the tribal Aleator people. A young agent sent these in hoping to gain some kind of value, but he knew well enough that this is not an accepted currency for advancement dues. A curator from the Tribes Museum will visit at some point and examine the coins but is unlikely to acquire them. The museum already has a lot. The coins will probably be sent to the Quartermaster’s Department to be used in future dealings with the Aleators.

Gilded Skull

A gilded skull from the bandit tribes. A patch of this skull’s scalp was preserved with pine resin so that its great black ponytail could remain upon the crown, tied against itself like a creeping caterpillar. The skull was mailed directly to Nigel Grim by the agent whose tribal allies paid him with it.

If no buyer from the Anthropology Institute acquires the skull, it will be sent to a goldsmith and then on to the morgue for cremation.

Blacklist Currency

There is a freestanding black rack of iron shelves holding a number of normal-looking coins, but some of them sport eerie imagery.

Now, few of the coins in this counting house were acquired directly from the mints of friendly states. In fact, many originate from blacklisted producers; international pariahs for whom Starling & Shrike detectives may not contract.

Legitimate clients sometimes pay out coins from blacklisted city-states secondhand to Starling & Shrike agents. However, S&S agents are also permitted to seize assets from people who they lawfully kill or capture, unless a contract stipulates otherwise, and so many of these coins were taken directly in such a manner as well.

Seized assets sometimes also include real estate, famous art, automobiles, ships, and airplanes, though the seizure of real estate requires the consent of locally governing authorities. These assets are considered the private property and can’t be used for advancement dues unless the agent liquidates them.

There are dozens of blacklisted city-states. Those most proximate to Starling & Shrike are Archzenith, Grimwall, Feyglade, and Bounty.

Archzenith and Grimwall have waged wars of aggression, Feyglade has been subjugated by heartless prairie nomads, and Bounty engages in slave raiding. The city of Bombaryx will soon be added to the list due to a state security purge in which several visiting S&S agents were hanged from the city’s Panopticon.

An S&S detective cannot kill the agents of blacklisted states except in self-defense or the defense of allies. There are, however, a number of organizations which are categorically outlawed by S&S. A detective may freely deceive, rob, kidnap and kill their members.

Small teams of S&S agents occasionally even organize heists, cons, and assassinations against outlawed organizations. The Council doesn’t encourage this kind of skulduggery because it darkens Starling & Shrike’s reputation, but nor do they interfere beyond defining limits on conduct involving outlaws. Detectives are not allowed to brutally torture or sexually exploit outlaws, nor are they permitted to ransom them or use them as confidential informants (no “catch and release”). To be clear S&S agents are permitted to kill them without warning or confine them indefinitely.

The most prominent of these outlawed organizations are the Cynthian Empire, the Red Charter Companies, and the Crag of Songs Killers.

The Finance Institute considers it very important to inspect the condition of currency from blacklisted and outlawed mints for debasement, clipping, current figureheads and newly-appearing themes. After a full documentation has been made, the currency in this category will be melted down and recast into ingots at the Starling & Shrike treasury.

Bounty Shilling

Obverse: A vast phalanx of men marching into a cave. They are subtly linked together at the neck by chains. This is in commemoration of the greatest haul ever taken by the river slavers of Bounty: a vast and overloaded prison hulk sighted off Cape Cittacotte. They simply hooked it up to a tugboat and hauled it off to a mine. Cape Cittacotte has made no inquiries after the prisoners.

Reverse: A great apple in the shape of a prison hulk. Its flesh is made up of welded-together corrugated iron sheets and there’s a breathing tube for a stem.

Grimwall Plate

Obverse: This large sterling silver coin depicts an armored cyclops about to swallow a screaming warrior whose torn-off arms lay in the dust beneath. This represents Grimwall’s surprise conquest and sack of Mandala. This was accomplished largely by tank.

Reverse: The tanks were then used to haul a vast quantity of Mandala’s marble to Grimwall; as such, the rear of the coin has an image of a monopteros supporting a mountain. The Mandalan Colonnades are now the Pillars of Grimwall.

Atrialic Alembic

Obverse: An herbal bouquet of digitalis, opium and quinine. These are the City of Atrialia’s chief exports.

Reverse: A legion of hard, wild-eyed women standing in varying states of explicit interest and disinterest. This is based off of a painting commissioned by the Atrialic tyrant Goval panegyrizing the city’s prostitutes.

Red Charter Reserve

Obverse: A beautiful wreath of mustard plants. This is in homage to mustard gas. The Companies regularly use it to secure RGOs held by determined defenders.

Reverse: An oil rig bristling with flak cannons and buoyed by sea mines.

Archzenith Seneschal

Obverse: A warrior in a muscle cuirass and horsehair helmet sodomizes another man whom the warrior has gripped by the long and elegant hair. The warrior carries a fourfold shield bearing the crests of Archzenith’s four noble houses. This coin commemorates Archzenith’s subjugation of Palmgrove, which Archzenith subsequently stripped of much of its male population to work in the mines. Palmgrove’s great artists have also been specifically imprisoned and since then have disappeared.

Reverse: Palm trees seeming to bow submissively in every direction. A banner flies along the rim of the coin emblazoned with “Circumvallation      and      Debellatio”. The coin is .999 gold, an exceedingly rare and impractical material for coinage. This reflects the impossible wealth now spilling from Archzenith’s mines in the wake of the ruination of Palmgrove.

Cynthian Apple

Obverse: The front side of this dinner-plate gold coin bears the incandescent likeness of Sir Narelenia Steliana, Her Expeditionary Claimant to the Kadwan Coast (“Her” being the Cynthian Queen). This man is responsible for organizing the conquest of the Kingdom of Kadwa and will be granted lordship over it should he succeed, which he hasn’t yet. These huge coins are used almost exclusively for rewarding agents, bribing foreign leaders, and paying auxiliary troops who often chop the soft coins up like pie to be shared out among them.

Sir Steliana sits on a throne with his legs crossed ostentatiously over a plump arabesque ottoman; his tunic is gold just like his actual one, but his tights and riding boots have been set in jet. This stone will come off or become cracked should this coin be subjected to rough handling.

Reverse: The Cynthian Queen sitting on a battleship in the manner of a maiden riding sidesaddle upon a dolphin. She wears a kind of voluminous kimono set with thousands of warships growing from branches in lace. A vast pheasant sits upon her shoulder with its tail flowing down her body and its head lovingly curled around her neck. Her thin hands are draped around the soft body of the pheasant. In one hand she cups a handful of saffron and with the other dangles a misericorde by the tip.

Butterflies flit around her locks in a halo.

River Island Butchery

The showroom of this pleasant-smelling wooden building has an open floor plan halfway ringed by cooled cases and charcuterie racks.

There are wooden closets along the wall where game from the nearby woods hangs: venison, elk, and pheasant are sold here cheaply on consignment from hunters. This is commonly eaten by detectives who are just starting out.

Meats have been flown in on refrigerated flights for the more prosperous. There are stone-boned and pillowy porterhouses, powerful racks of ribs, towers of toulouse sausages, scallops from the Wine, salami, salmon from the rivers, sweet and flaky sheepshead, bordelaise, demi-glacé, pork rillettes, fish pâté, guanciale, ‘Nduja, beef tagine with raisins, bucco in twine, lamb loin terrine loaded with pistachios, and cured pig face cooked 16 hours with herbs in the cheek and prominently piled upon a pale silver platter.

There’s a vast and rolling selection of charcuterie prepared by the butcher on the top shelves of the cooling cases. Ruby roast beef, tallow-wicking pastrami heaping with spices, hearty hunter's pâté of boar shoulder and duck meat, and white cubes of cured fatty pork meat dusted with cayenne. These last delicacies are solid but seem to turn to liquid when bitten.

There is also a bucket of dehydrated liver treats for the city’s working dogs.

The butcher’s specialty are cuts of River Island Hog from a pig farm near the slopes of Starling & Shrike. This is one of the few continually-inhabited sites in the region which is away from the mountaintop itself. Everyone knows they are taking a risk by going there, but agents in need of true peace still travel to the farm to sleep in gas lantern yurts along the murmuring river bisecting the property. The place is notorious for an adventurous farm cat who selects a yurt and bed to sleep in each night. It is a minor tradition to bring this cat little pieces of meat from the butcher.

The River Island pork chops make people look at the ceiling and laugh when they taste them. The white bacon is almost all fat except for a hint of pink on the inner crescent. This is the most delicious bacon you’ve ever tasted and it leaves the pan filled with translucent fat once you’ve fried it for just a minute or two. There is also dark sirloin bacon for more conservative tastes.

The butcher makes some of this pork into sausages which are, to varying degrees, experiments (e.g. egg, cheese and bacon sausage).

There are heaps of cheap, gleaming cream pork belly (a common instrument of futures speculation in the city-port of Periapt) and pork fat to grease pans with. 

The butcher sells a few sundries from racks near the door. He has loaves of sourdough delivered from a bakery a few lanes down, and there’s rich butter which is as soft as custard on the block.

There are fragrant burlap sacks of slick coffee beans which the butcher imports in competition with the city’s general stores.

There’s a walk-in freezer containing whole cream with the fat on top for the coffee. You will also find whole ducks and chickens in little nets, chunks of chicken with the skins still on, and stews imported from foreign restaurants and caterers. These come in tin cylinders and have their contents and origins written on them in paintbrush.

“Duck and pork confit, pork belly sausage, white kidney beans and breadcrumbs atop.

Ascension Aeromarine caterering department - Ascension”

“Garlic, sea robin, anise, scorpionfish, saffron, monkfish, velvet crab, bay leaf.

Lid chamber sauce - Saffron, garlic, olive oil, cayenne 

Eviratee - Doveshoot Down”

“mix sacks over rice

paprika cayenne garlic pepper oregano celery

shallot + wine pork sausages

deep fried pork & rice sausage in quail w absinthe glaze

shrimp & oysters

Duke & Margrave’s - Dom.o. Mandrake”

The butcher shop has an oven for preparing its own charcuterie. On Saturday nights when people are drinking at the Zugzwang he and his staff set out tables on the street and bring round cuts of meat straight from the oven which can be paid for by the slice. If you want some of what’s on offer you toss a small coin into a little tin bucket at the center of your table.

The butcher can make change for silver but if you want to change gold coins you’ll need to run next door to Nigel Grim.

The Lionel Leonoct Library of Detection

This is the world's foremost reference library for detectives.

Once might assume that this is the only library of its type, but the Feyglade secret police also have a small one too. It's pathetic by comparison and the secret police have suffered several bloody shakeups in leadership as a result of escaped dissidents.

Lionel Leonoct has two wings divided by a grassy reading courtyard: Literature is to the left of the entry hall, and Ways to the right. 

There is a Map Room behind the Entrance Hall before the Courtyard.

    Literature Wing

The Literature Wing contains works on the history and culture of almost every city-state, down to the most hermetic. It has treatises on the systems of international trade, copies of the missives and newsletters of NGOs, the minutes of watchdog organizations and charitable institutions, and studies on underground organizations and conspiracies from Anrcho-Syndicalists to antinatalist murder cults to millenarian monarchists.

There are cases full of artifacts taken from bandit tribes, underground religious sects and defeated Cynthians between the bookshelves.

There is a rack for books and pamphlets written by avowed enemies of Starling & Shrike (whose agents are viewed as assassins, labor spies, saboteurs and agents-provocateur by a healthy percentage of the world’s population). There is even a selection of Baroque, fantastic and pitiless Cynthian literature. 

There is a reference room in the rear of the wing which contains the genealogies of prominent families across the world, as well as biographies of prominent detectives of the past, national leaders and founding fathers, and Starling & Shrike case studies of the greatest villains (human and otherwise) faced by the city and its allies throughout history.

    Ways Wing

This wing sports a selection of how-to manuals which could turn a police chief's hair white. It begins with housebreaking, bombmaking, interrogation, the organization of guerrilla movements, eavesdropping techniques and devices, clandestine communication, smuggling, and hand to hand combat.

The most prominent book on mêlée written by a Starling & Shrike agent is entitled “The Death Struggle”, by Iron Finger (nom de plume; the incredibly graphic case studies depicting stomach-churning killings of Starling & Shrike’s foes could certainly lead to a directed reprisal).

The section continues with a number of technical manuals on somewhat more civil topics such as locksmithing, gunsmithing, engine mechanics, belaying, trapping, frontier construction, telecommunication, and the arrangement of simple machines.

This wing’s academic aisles contain a vast literature on forensic science, criminology, sociology, anthropology, archaeology, environmental and visual search patterns, autopsies, propaganda and pamphleteering, vexillology, numismatics, heraldry (aristocratic, merchant, military order, and Cynthian), and a corpus of psychology to rival the University of Troutbridge.

There’s a dark, densely-stocked legal archive containing the full law codes of many city-states, and it even has works on the customs and founding myths of many bandit tribes. These could be considered literature, but many bandit tribe lawspeakers base their rulings on the behavior depicted in their legends.

Notably absent from the Library of Detection are books on hardcore engineering, mathematics, art history and reference, architecture, mainstream fiction and philosophy, and books about Starling & Shrike itself. All of these and more can be found in the grand public library next door to Council Hall.

The Library of Detection is open only to full citizens and trespassing is grounds for losing one's residency, lest we forget S&S is not some paradise.

    Map Room

This room has thousands of rolled up blueprints for the most important public facilities of many city-states. There are pull-out topographic maps of their surrounding geography, and special cabinets hold maps of important passes and canals.

Archer Armatures

This is a pistolsmith specializing in the engraving of firearms.

The display room smells of machined metal, gun lubricant like a mild engine grease, and black coffee kept boiling and burnt on a campfire stove resting on a glass gun case.

There are a vast variety of schematics and sketches for modifications which can be performed upon the .45 semiautomatic pistol issued by Starling & Shrike to Detection Academy graduates. These can be found in little cardboard books scattered around the display cases and ammunition tables or else just tacked onto the walls.

Almost every modification depicted in this literature pertains to the engraving of firearms.

After an upbringing of stricture, repetition and conformity, most graduates are eager for self-differentiation. This is just part of the wing-spreading process; almost every new agent is eager to experience the world and apply their abilities (with a degree of trepidation), and the freedom experienced upon being released from the academy can be overwhelming.

Many freshly-minted agents end up spending their first few contract payouts on lavish clothes, cutting-edge appliances, fine dining, and top-of-the-line motorcars (which they soon discover are of limited value to globe-trotting detectives). Outfitters, real-estate agents and would-be mistresses know to look for fresh-faced young S&S agents stepping off of planes in their black-and-whites.

This is all regarded as an inevitable part of the blossoming process and new S&S agents receive extensive counseling on money management, international legal norms, venereal disease and the effects of corpulence or garishness upon their social desirability before receiving their first plane ticket.

If you walk around to look at the decorative designs in the booklets and on weapon pieces ready to be installed, you will first see various famous detectives from Starling & Shrike’s history, from a detective who arrested over a thousand suspects without ever having killed anyone, to a Council Inspector who killed 94 suspects before being devoured by a labiothorax in hiding.

From Starling & Shrike’s only billionaire investor to the Grayscale Saints, who were itinerant problem solvers who devoted every red cent of their profit to charitable works.

From images of the flintlock pistol and rapier issued to S&S graduates a century ago to modern instruments of annihilation like howitzers, bombers, machine guns and tanks.

From knights, cuirassiers and cataphracts, to naked and painted bandit tribe headhunters and their bloody harvests.

Snakes, scorpions, mongeese and eagles. Hippogriffs and lammasus, unicorns with serpents coiled around their horns. Lions, cheetahs, boar and bear. Cock, bull, mustang. Tyrannosaurus rex. More rarely, the dove, skunk, and porcupine.

Mothers, fathers, consuls and cousins. The famous bounty hunters, lawmen and vigilantes of foreign history.

Vistas of Starling & Shrike’s encompassing forest or visions of the shining city on a hill. Esoteric sigils of vision and foresight, leylines under starlight, runestones, fanes and sanctums, the religious iconography of the Fates, the Sun Lion, and the Burning Eye.

This gunsmith only works silver, black and pearl. The standard-issue handgun is silver with mother of pearl grips, but it is common to make it all-black, all-pearlescent, or silver with black and white racing tile, zebra, or dazzle-pattern grips.

S&S player characters may add other colors to their standard-issue firearms, but NPC Starling & Shrike agents will not.

It’s the players’ right and prerogative to be the exception.

That said, NPC S&S agents do sometimes commission fantastically opulent and ostentatious firearms for use when they are not wearing their traditional clothing. Some agents never wear traditional garb when they’re off the mountaintop; others wear it continually as a kind of advertisement for employment, call for aid, and statement of legitimacy.

Some notes on ammo:

There are all kinds of ammo for sale here: anti-cuirass FMJ, hollow points, wadcutters for the subterranean paper-on-wire shoothouse at the Trigun Academy, subsonic and overpressure to taste, and exotic experimental and particularist ammo such as snake shot, ricocheting steel shot, controversial “double-helix” expansion rounds, and explosive bullets for combat missions against a select few outlawed enemies.

All ammo is .45 caliber because the S&S standard-issue pistol and submachine gun for hazardous duty are both chambered in .45. Shotgun shells and 30.06 rifle cartridges are available from a wilderness outfitter a few streets over, and 9mm is imported in small quantities by the Finance Institute and the Council inspectors. Finance personnel carry weapons abroad, but they use a 9mm semiautomatic pistol. It inflicts smaller wounds than the .45 but it has a greater margin for error due to its capacity, which is double the .45’s 7+1 load. The Council Inspectors use 9mm on an individual basis when using fully automatic machine pistols.

Widow's Walk

This stucco building has a tall and narrow wrought-iron gate. This leads to a mail foyer with a white mosaic floor depicting a horse with a sword through its body being cradled by a grieving satyr. Beyond this is a well-vegetated courtyard with a clear fountain. Water streams from stone peacocks in the fountain in place of tails. Doorways to the apartments surround the courtyard.

This is the tallest building on the lane at three stories and there are several walkways built along the roof which offer splendid views of the botanical garden, Starling & Shrike’s cityscape, and the forest around the city. By day you can smell the coffee from the Follies; by night you catch the kitchen.

These apartments tend to play host to young detectives and finance agents who enjoy spending time in the city, and working class permanent residents.

Many young detectives do maintain residences outside the city, especially those intending that their children will not become citizens of Starling & Shrike

Older detectives tend to purchase homes in the residential areas near the edge of the mountaintop.

The Zugzwang

This place is a chess club by day and a dancehall by night. It is named onomatopoeically for a highly linear creature once encountered by explorers in the Bogs of Burnfast.

Permanent residents play live music at night. Sloshed detectives sometimes get up to play solos.

Foreign musicians are barred from Starling & Shrike. The Council wishes to keep heroin and syphilis out of the city. They maintain the severe policy that the city is for some things and not for others. 

As a result, some detectives travel to Starling & Shrike only when they are required to.

The walls are painted a dark, avocado green. The archways are cherry red, as are the window frames and the climbing floral designs which cover a third of the walls. The floor is a mosaic of smoky white tiles and greenstone.

Chess tables and chairs are set out during the day but at night they are carried away to the basement. 

There is a staircase up to the loft and down to the bathrooms. The banister is cherry red and has black, ornate supports with the wrought iron outlines of fulminating, fumigating boiler-dragons and their gusty breath.

The darkened loft has carpeted red columns embraced by embroidered vines. The stone cellar floor is so polished that at first glance it seems to be flooded.

The bartender, Simon Merenkel, was raised in the forest surrounding Starling & Shrike by a small group of exiles. He was taken in by the city as a permanent resident after making a heartfelt petition and ended up using his knowledge of the wilderness in service with the Starling & Shrike liaisons who choose to embed themselves with select foreign militaries.

He has recently decommissioned from an S&S battlefield forensics team embedded with the Tungsten Crypt militia. 

Merenkel prowls around the bar leering at people, scratching himself and wiping his nose. His voice is loud and rough and his eyes are wild like he’s beholding Red Charter storm troopers in their hideous gas masks, not patrons.

He loves to drink and bully meek patrons, and few will place food orders at the Zugzwang when the cook calls in sick and he steps into the kitchen, but his free disposition makes him popular among mannered young detectives and he has many friends among the veterans of his war.

There are chess sets in the Zugzwang with pieces carved and painted to represent the archetypal agents and assets of a number of city-states and organizations. The creation of these sets was the last project of a far-travelled S&S agent who was paralyzed from the waist down when a fugitive shot him in the crypt city of Thanofane.

He carved many of these pawns from his own eyewitness experience. Some, like the Cynthian Queen, are by necessity carved from imagistic representations familiar to the agent.

He completed a number of sets but died of septic shock before declaring that he’d completed all of the sets he’d intended to; certainly he had been party to conflicts he has not represented here. 

The chess sets are grouped by enmity. The following are publicly available for use by passersby:

-Starling & Shrike

-The Cynthian Empire

-The Red Charter Companies

-City of Troutbridge Navy

-The Grimwall Column

-Anarcho-Syndicalists/The City of Leagues

-The Tourmaline Gorge Task Force

-The Dominion of Mandrake

-The Kingdom of Kadwa

-The Royal Conurbation of Bombaryx

There are a number of other sets in the backroom which only S&S detectives in good standing may view.

The Valerian Caracole Botanical Gardens

This is a small, densely-wooded botanical garden.

The shaggy trees of the taiga fill this place with the scent of spruce and fir. You will find alpine plants in most of S&S's parks, but the plants here are seasonally rotated in and out of greenhouses and cooling sheds. The cypress and fig of the dry summer climates around the Wine have been put away in the greenhouses now. 

A little flagstone trail winds through the trees past curved stone benches in the garden’s deep recesses.

You must make a number of correct turns along the botanical trail to reach the rotunda, which is an ivy-girt marble colonnade. Underneath it is a wrought iron stairwell winding around an alabaster statue of Valerian Caracole, a Starling & Shrike detective who gave his life exposing and dismantling the Hallucigenian Diadochi. He is considered a national father to several city-states which were secretly under antediluvian control at the time.

The stairwell leads into a greenhouse dome covered in ivy atop the rotunda.

Butterflies flit in the garden in the summer months but they’ve been netted and returned to their nursery in the greenhouse now.

The pupae were taken a prize by a Starling & Shrike agent acting as a forward observer for a unit of Diadem Arachnids during the cutting-out of the Cynthian battlecruiser Natural Right.

Artpunk Adventure: Silicasilk

Summary: A mad subterranean plunder-hunt, like sun Vikings in a luxurious Hel the surfacers seek to strip every ounce of the precious silicasilk from outré underworld civilizations to be sold across the oceans. At the terminus of this worldroot is a legendary ring of giant geodes which contain the souls of a lost civilization's Jonestown moment when they crushed themselves into the foundations of the earth. These souls are your ultimate prize if you can return them to the surface without allowing them to wreak their ultimate revenge on their destroyers along the way, thus throwing your journey into the chaos of underground warfare, atrocity, and tectonic destruction.

Areas are arranged linearly as a descent.

SURFACE

The vast arctic plain is icy black beneath the white night sky where the billowing clouds are given life by the sun-silver moon.

The snow is laced with volcanic ash and falls black onto your skin, spotting you leprous or leopardlike. It melts like mascara tears in sootblack streaks of tigerstripe.

In the ground there are cast iron redoubts and hideouts poured into concrete moulds and set. The concrete is gone and there are dark awnings, concave crescent walls between arched doorways into shadow. Black snow is piled high overhead and underfoot in the smooth semicircle valleys where the dugout-redoubts were cut into the walls of rock.

There are signal fires at intervals around this place. It would be impossible to spot otherwise. From the volcanoside the eight flames on the scarred plain of blackness mark the buckling eruption of a younger, more-vibrant Hell.

That is the fear. This place was chosen to be settled and fortified because the caves here lead to a sump which opens into the greater underdark. A watery umbilical cord to the underworld.

Guards watch the sump in small caverns burning with the dung of polar bears and seals. They bar the way to their fastnesses with pavises emblazoned with renditions of underworld predators, upperworld legends, saints, virgins, chalky dicks with “pleased to meet you” etc scrawled on them. Each man keeps a pike laid against his pavise for quick access and has a pair of dragon blunderbuss pistols hanging about his neck by a watch with a pair of long chains to the pommels. Their load is antimony-hardened buckshot but they can also take rock salt (which illuminates the agonized foe should there be any ambient light). These firearms have barrels shaped like serpents, falcons, earthworms, penis heads, olm frills. One such gun has functional fangs that will envenom a foe who is cut by them.

One of the guards has a big, fluffy white dog with him. It is a sled dog but is also bred to be a warming dog, as in it will lay on you to keep you warm. If you are lagging behind he will tackle you and lay on you because you are the source of food. The guard will sell you this dog for five ounces of gold.

The sump looks like the gullet of a snake. It is 5' wide. A film of water awaits you. The water of the sump is ice cold and entering it feels like you are being stabbed through every inch of your skin. Entering it requires a Will check; take +2 if you are being pursued by hostile forces. Silicasilk is not destroyed by the water.

CAVERN

This is a vast cavern ripe with fungi of every color and description.

The absolute floor of the cavern is not visible even by some form of dark vision. It's all columns and bridges, ramps of stone, an escherscape of mineral curtains all the way down. Everywhere you look there are seams of rock crystal, buttery ore, weeping fungi, vistas of gems scattered across the walls like a God’s haughty charity. Like an aurora borealis caught underneath the earth and eroded through the stone across epochs.

There are scouts at the bottom.

These men were blinded at birth and live their lives from the outposts of their civilization, never to see the polities they protect. They move slowly but relentlessly because they touch everything with their hands before advancing like the whole world was a wall to be climbed. They can hear your heartbeat.

Those who took to the practice later in life wear valuable blindfolds of silicasilk. This is the most precious commodity in the world in terms of weight to value. Its origins are unknown. The scouts do not know its origins; only that they take it at war against those deeper in the earth.

They operate in teams of two. The teams tend to perch along the walls and columns using their climbing gear but may be encountered on a lateral sojourn through this cavern and its adjacent underlands.

Each scout team carries a 12’ smoothbore called a shafter on their shoulders. It is a punt gun wrapped in climbing equipment and it fires a blast of hundreds of 00 steel ball bearings which can ricochet up a curving tunnel for a hundred yards or more. The stone shrapnel of such a blast can be just as deadly as the balls. 

Its length and bore are intended to channel a shockwave up the tunnel but the firers still suffer.

It loads a massive charge of gunpowder requiring 15 minutes to properly pour.

The gunners can fire across caverns from wall to wall because their climbing gear includes means of winching up their gun. Each man carries a pair of short blades. After they fire their weapon, they roll it off their shoulders like a log and then charge in to finish off the wounded and disoriented foe. If there are multiple teams present one will form a backstop. If the advanced teams are driven from the melee they will fall behind the live gun and it’ll fire on their pursuers.

Gun charges are cylindrical and come with a leather carrying handle. Oftentimes they hang from the gun itself while the scout teams travel. The charges are divided by a leather disc, half gunpowder and half ball bearings. They make potent anti-personnel mines should a trail of gunpowder be traced to them.

For a symbol the scouts have a wide, terrified eye raised in polished sandstone so that they can feel it with their fingers. They are bald, pale, and most have a streaked scar from temple to temple where the acid was poured.

If you exit downwards from this cavern you will approach the crown jewel of their civilization- the fastness of the Sepia King of Stygoziana.

STYGOZIANA

This is the personal fief of the Sepia King.

You approach via 7’ x 7’ tunnel. There are veins of chalky crystal lining the walls here but they are not a natural feature. They are powdered arsenic set into a ceramic which coats a thin line of gunpowder. These white veins terminate at a guard post at the end of the tunnel where they can be safely detonated against intruders. This fills the tunnel with a choking dust of powdered arsenic. You cannot see the guard post until you are closer but they are likely to hear you.

As you come nearer to the guard post the veins begin to meld together into little strands like the veins of leaves terminating into twigs. Between them now the powdered death ivory has been inlaid into little intricate scenes designed to attract the eye and then horrify and demoralize the viewer before being detonated into his gaping face. Guards watch from embrasures in their lightless fastness.

Each individual story chain can be detonated from the guardpost so as to target individuals, whereas the veins further out in the tunnel must be detonated all at once.

Several warriors guard this redoubt. 

They are wispy waifish men all curly tousled hair, poutiness, earrings. Do not confuse this delicacy for the lack of viciousness. In this place, it marks the opposite. Those permitted to be dandies are killers. The least dangerous men in this fortress look rough and tough like poor peasants or weatherbeaten longshoremen. This is purely an effect of early aging.

Once you enter the fortress you’re likely to see a warrior strike a rough and boring laborer with the speed of a viper and the maliciousness of a cat. The laborer could overpower the warrior if both of them were unarmed but he doesn't know that.

One of the warriors of the guard post is a surfacer who became stuck at the citadel in his quest for the precious silicasilk. He came following a legend of a deep, decadent civilization where the men have forgotten how to fight and do nothing but spin silicasilk. To plunder such a place would make a man rich beyond imagining. This is not that civilization.

He wears a necklace shaped like a chariot pulled by mythological beasts, and on the back of his breastplate he has painted death as a mounted mercenary of the type farmers across the world fear more than plague.

He carries a red-bladed flamberge with a golden cup for a hilt; he pours out death.

Beyond the redoubt is the hall of the sepia king.

Bright red spiraling sashes loop around stalactites. They bear stitchframed pictures above a continuous frill of golden tassels like a curtain’s hem.

Band-shaped flags hang from stalactites in hoops of color.

Pillows on stone benches cut from the very walls, luminous things in pastel teal and pink and violet.

All are precious silicasillk.

Servants turn to face you as you enter. They wait on tables in the shadows set with game pieces at play, stone steins, earthware decanters pale blue in the darkness.

Their socks, gloves and cravats are precious silicasilk.

The warriors freeze with their palms on the tables, scarcely armed with stilettos and strangler’s cords.

Their sashes, neckerchiefs and eyepatches are precious silicasilk.

There is a woman officiating a banquet here. She is dressed in a single red ribbon and that she has wrapped around herself many hundreds of times in spiral crosshatches. A tight binding about the waist to draw out her hourglass. The ribbon forms her sandals and terminates in her hair, weaving in and out of her brown curls like a sea serpent.

Her ribbon is precious silicasilk and she wears a great golden crescent on her forehead like a buttery moon.

The ribbon is the garb of Stygozianian women. Each wears it differently, from a broad black band woven into an austere bodysuit to a single jade strand playing about the shoulders like a snake. Their flesh is as cold as ice and they would find you like demons of heat. However, if you aren’t a warrior and you aren’t interesting and graceful these women will mock you relentlessly

Above this hall is the reception chamber of the King of Stygoziana. It is like a full-service theater box from which the Sepia King of Stygoziana observes his subjects. You may spot his eyes when you look around the hall.

His chamber is sepia and so is his throne, but the silicasilk carpet is crimson and the candlesticks adamantine. He wears purple, like a king.

Silicasilk runs from a ring in his nose, covering his mouth and dividing in two near his solar plexus like a great purple moustache. It terminates at his gold bracelets. Naturally you could strip this and run but you'd drag him a ways before his bracelets came free. Not a bad way to take a prisoner. He wears a purple hood that is tied close to his head, but this is linen and not silicasilk. His only visible flesh is between his brow and his nose: huge, mad, orange eyes.

Should the party have managed to enter peacefully, the Sepia King has one offer for them: you may marry into his royal family should you bring him 100 Typhoean foreskins as proof of the owners' destruction. The greatest living Stygozianan warrior has only taken 78 and he is currently laid up wounded. The king refers to the Typhoeans as “vermin” and “the insect-men from the deep.” He knows little of their ways, never having fought them personally.

Below the grand hall is a larder and an armory. 

The larder is first. Servants flit to and fro here and laborers come from their forges in the armory to help themselves. Stygoziana is the land of frozen seafood. It feeds itself off of subterranean rivers and the dark ice of the surface world touches the tunnels here. The larders are simply icebeds in the walls laden with shrimp, clams, cavefish and lobster.

Beyond the larder is the armory. Should the players have mounted an assault on this hold, the heavy infantry will march from the armory to dispose of them. These are the king's personal retainers.

They are like gothic iron lizardmen. Their armor is forged to resemble snakes, snails, alligators, cave lobsters, dragons. They draw themselves up and sit against their tails when they fire for the tail is part and parcel with their weapon systems. 

Some of their weapons billow thermobaric fire-filaments which are subsequently set alight after drifting for some time, and suck the lungs out of their foes. Others fire shaped charges which are stored in the tail and superpressurize tunnel sections to crush their foes from the inside out. Others still hiss desiccation gas into their enemy’s presumed position.

Some of them have armor of finely-worked crystal and you can see the warrior inside. This is in imitation of the translucent cavern creatures. Oftentimes he is shirtless and a direct hit will pool his blood inside his breastplate. You will see him suffer. 

Their captain’s tongue is a rocket, and he will light it with his teeth.

You can hear the metal tails of heavy infantry dragging over the rough stone as they approach your position. It is a horrible sound.

There are 96 determined heavy infantrymen and the party is unlikely to defeat the Stygozianan garrison without using some kind of WMD. However, they will not pursue the party into Typhoea.

Past the second guard post, the exit tunnel is a horrific morass of razorwire. Bundles of the shit tangle the air and totally bar the way. When it's time to let someone through, the men of the guard post turn a winch which tightens the wires and straightens them into where they emerge from the walls so that a person could actually pick his way through the laser corridor of perfectly straight wires. When they slacken the corridor returns to being a pipe clogged with razor sharp hair and god help you should you be here when that happens.

TYPHOEA

You enter the capital greenhouse and breadbasket of the Typhoeans.

This is a cave region of hanging fungal agglomerative vines, thick carpets of moss that squelch hot water over your feet as you pass, a dewy mist in the air that makes everything clammy and alternatingly chills and threatens to overheat you. A thunderous thermal waterfall crashes upon rocks and lends its mist and humidity into every corner of these caverns.

The vines are some kind of flower-tendril; tangled yellow locks like hair amongst languid vines. They pass through hanging moss garlands and herbal entanglements.

From the corners snake sickly-sweet flowers with sawtoothed petals in opulent bloom above stones damp with their natal warmth.

These plants are fed by a radiance field emitted from a bulbous central cavern. This field suppresses the immune systems of all who enter it without gaining the biological permission of its denizens. As such. the party will begin to be overwhelmed by bacteria and suffer from dangerous flu symptoms after about a day, and any existing diseases will be drastically worsened. Individuals who are already immunocompromised will suffer from an immune response brought to near-undetectability, and will be incapacitated after a day, dead in two. This realm is highly bacterial and hostile to intruders.

The party will soon begin to encounter patrols of Typhoean warriors. This is their realm. They are hulking and have rough, pale skin like white rhinos. Should the party run away, they will witness these warriors emitting strange whiplike extensions from their fingertips in lieu of climbing gear, which are also capable of grappling the PCs from a distance. Should the PCs hide, these warriors will explore the crevices of the cavern with their extensions, which on close examination resemble a limp, fleshy tape.

These are the parasite-people. The warriors have worms which act as extra muscle and secrete androgens. Further in, there are peons and the shepherds of camel sloths. These people all have parasites which secrete tranquilizers or stimulants depending on pheromones from a control parasite embedded in the body of a nearby noble. They can shut down commoners, and so could you if you had such a parasite.

The warriors and nobles are privileged with a parasite living behind their eyes which gives darkvision, amplifying existing light, and thermal vision, which aids in hunting. If you shoot this guy in the head and it explodes you’ll see chunks of the parasite go flying too.

The warriors wear heavy silicasilk cloaks patterned with vistas, warrior heraldry, dramatic scenes, stygian hunting beasts or chemical diagrams. Tectonic patterns (which are the astrology of the deep), and veiny ore underlays like the neuronal structure of a brain or universe. Every one of these cloaks is very valuable for its cloth of silk, but it is potentially more valuable for the things it depicts. The trouble will be matching a subject with an appropriate buyer, because the cloaks are dramatically esoteric.

Their primary weapons are matchlock harpoon guns. These fire chitinous tracking parasites linked to the warrior's parasitic suite. Once the parasite is implanted, the warrior can toggle starvation food-interception and dissociation/self-sabotage neurotransmitter effects on its host. A wounded, fleeing foe has not truly escaped.

They also carry grenades that splash those nearby with fungal residue, causing massive cysts to erupt in their flesh. These cysts are largely harmless but critically bog down the victim and take a long time to drain properly. The warriors carry huge obsidian knives to drain your cysts, or your blood if they won't be taking you prisoner.

When you reach the central cavern, you will see that it is a kind of aerial ranch. It is brightly lit and filled with sprigs of greenery; spice herbs of every description and sweet forms of watercress in v-shaped rock troughs. Huge, tan sloths hang from low stalactites by their claws. They lean their white-maned heads back to receive food poured down their gullets by stiff and wizened sloth shepherds overseen by bored and erratic nobles.

The shepherds feed the camel sloths a molten margarine of oxidized synthetic paraffin wax derived from coal. They love their animals and give the margarine flavor with a variety of herbs and sweeteners. The Typhoeans occasionally eat this margarine as well but consider it a starvation food.

The camel sloths are covered with little fleshy nibs here and there. These are the heads of long worms that live inside their bodies. Whenever a Typhoean is hungry, he’ll come to a camel sloth and suck down a worm like meat spaghetti. This is how they eat while at home. When on journeys, they can draw out their own colorectal parasites for sustenance.

In the heart of this underworld ranch is a great black stone. Walk around it until you see a great strip of salmon-colored flesh like an iguana with a hundred little flagella legs and no head. This great parasite has transcended the need for its native realm, but, like a Buddha, remains near so that it can guide and protect its people. Freed from any need for a human host, this parasite basks on a stretch of wall waving its antennae through the air. This generates the radiance field needed to sustain the plant life in these caverns and suppress the immune systems of those not in possession of a Typhoean parasite.

If the Buddhic parasite of Typhoea dies, so too dies the lush greenery which its emanations maintain. With no hope of sustaining their camel sloths the Typhoeans will tearfully euthanize their beloved beasts and immediately invade their neighboring realms: Stygoziana above and another civilization below. They will conquer or die.

Standing serenely atop this great black rock is the Queen in Green, monarch and despot of Typhoea. She is redheaded but her freckles have fallen away, leaving empty flesh where they once stood so that blood continually runs down her face.

She wears white gloves which go halfway up her vibrant white biceps. Her skin has never been touched by the sun. Two white ribbons of cloth extend from her arms to the small of her back with ivory and bone hanging from them- statues, fetishes, shishkebabs of bead-heads, spikes of subdued light. Across her shoulders she wears something like a fur, but it is made up of soft, green, bushy herbs. A long, green serpent-form twists almost invisibly among these sprigs. It weaves its way around her arm from underneath her nail. It appears to be headless, like the creature on the rock.

She can detonate parasites that are inside of you. This leads to fissures, blood poisoning and compound fractures. She will use this to get what she wants.

Sun-strengthened surfacers are of great appeal to her. If any party members are particularly robust, beauteous, dangerous-looking or impetuous, then she will single them out for an audience. She prefers prowess matched with arrogance in men, but inexperience and curiosity in women.

Her bed is a grand spiderweb of ghostly pale silicasilk set at an angle. Sex with her will inject parasites into you.

When the men and women of this civilization make love, then too will their parasites mate. You will see their bodies wrapped here and there with slick, reedy ropes which curl about one another in true lovers’ knots and stain their sheets with a translucent residue.

Should you make love to a woman of this civilization in her earthwax bower you will find soft worms slipping up your rectum and urethra. Should you surrender to a man, you will feel bundles of tape-serpents moving through you.

Finishing with the Queen in Green feels like being stabbed in the soul as it’s made clear what you’ve done or what’s been done to you.

Further sex may be used to reinforce the power of her hold on you, to inject new parasites, and to recalibrate the ones already inside you. The queen of the parasites lives in the Queen in Green; parasites injected in this way are her agents and may self-detonate should they find you defying their Lady, but their intelligence is alien and their understanding imperfect. Certain drugs could dull them to be surgically removed. Otherwise they will explode when you attempt to draw them out.

An extended battle here will draw warriors from all over Typhoea.

As you depart Typhoea and descend, you will near the source of the silicasilk. The Stygozianans raid Typhoea for it, and the Typhoeans trade for it with the industrial fortress of Asterica.

ASTERICA

The narrow tunnel turns and suddenly opens into a dizzyingly vast cavern. Great stone bulwarks hunker beneath a titanic ridged vault wall. They are a fortress shaped like a bisected log with wide ridges and grooves at intervals down its front like bands about a tree. Great livid banners of silicasilk have been flung out from its alures. They contain more silicasilk than could be imagined in Stygoziana or Typhoea.

You see bridges here and there which extend from the fortress to the great floor of the cave, and there is amber light at the tunnel mouths. There are catwalks between balconies and outcroppings on the fortress's exterior. Silver skeletons which seem hazy and furred march precisely along these ramps and walkways.

On closer inspection these skeletons are glazed in lead to weight their bones. Each bone is subsequently flanged with blades so that the whole skeleton seems to be made up of deadly feathers. In its ribcage is a cask made of shale. This is a bomb.

Running along the length of their bones are articulating wires, axles and cams, mechanisms driven watch-like by a central mechanism above the cask in the chest; windup centrifuges kept in balance by a spinning die tip on a radial spirit level adjust their step as they advance along the bridge or tunnel. You hear whirling driveshafts, clinking cam followers and purring gear assemblies. The skeletons clatter and spark off of each other's deadly blades.

When struck but not detonated their mechanism weeps bulbs of carrot-colored engine grease. 

The skeletons of the outer guardposts bear heraldry, dazzle camouflage, or are black to bake them into the shadows. They are eulogies to their former owners and are a form of sacred tax paid by their family. They decorate the bones and this reflects their wealth and taste. Thus a skeleton may bear the regalia of kingship, or piety, wealth, or shameful contrition. They may be gilded or without any decoration whatsoever.

It might be some time before you see people. They come furtively and set their iron skeletons marching at you from the shadows before slipping away in a hurried retreat.

Some skeletons trail deadly greenish gas, others spray unlit naptha across the walls to be set afire by a subsequent skeleton.

Both men and women dress exclusively in robes of silicasilk dyed with the powder of crushed luminous gems or the ink of Stygian bivalves.

In battle, men drag six foot by three foot iron tubes across the stone by leather straps hoisted about their chests. They stand the tubes up and open them and out come the ticking marching skeletons. The skeleton detonates after marching a distance set by the wielder, and their lead-weighted, blade-covered bones make for extraordinarily deadly shrapnel.

In a battle they will march their skeletons down every hallway and staircase at you in a relentless, explosive tide. Their stairs are measured to receive the step of the skeletons.

The interior of the fortress is a honeycomb of infinite pitfalls. 

The rooms are lit by orange crystal in wrought iron cylinders cut with intricate designs and patterns which cast light throughout this place in highly uneven but distractingly intriguing shapes, for many of these crystal cylinders tell stories like Attic pottery.

The halls ripple with luminous neon tapestries in hexagrammic or nettled incomplete concentric rings that seem to rotate in an optical illusion; nets of joined Xs, pink and black, lime green and black, purple and black, teal and black.

As you approach the heart of the fortress, the light changes from freestanding cylinders to hidden compartments cut into the walls. Vents of light made of energized crystal. The air becomes a dazzle camouflage and here you barely see the skeletons move, you just see them in various states of advance. When these crystals are electrified defensively via hand crank stations they will begin to slowly mutate and mutilate those who stand in the light. You will see companions horribly transform frame by frame as you run in bast bars of stagnant but flickering light.

Further confusing matters are charms hanging from stalactites consisting of hollow centered coins hanging on lengths of leather. These coins are remnants of the oldest civilization and the hole punched through the center is part of their debasement. They consist of many rare earth elements blended together into a peppery-colored amalgamation; useful to be rendered down for ancient materials projects.

If you are advancing on the place where the Astericans spin silicasilk they are willing and able to collapse caverns around you. That said, they will not cut off their access to their primary industry completely.

In the heart of this fortress is the place where the Astericans produce their silicasilk. It is a dome of stained glass lit by an ephemeral light. Outside the glass is a thin layer of bioluminescent scarabs.

The Astericans work gently with the silica spiders, shy creatures whose joy is to spin their silk if fed on herbs and button mushrooms. The silica spiders will run and hide if there is chaos in their home, but if seized upon will bite their assailant. Their bite instantly detonates flesh and bone like a hand grenade.

The boldest Astericans cover their eyes with silicasilk and go out into nearby tunnels. They see the prancing ghosts of underworld creatures that have passed away and hunt them with imaginary spears.

The departed beast’s ghost leads them to its carrion, and this is Asterica’s main food source.

Beneath Asterica there is a place the Astericans do not want you to see.

THE LODESTONES OF PHLOGISTON CREOSOTE

There is a column of fire surrounded by eight hulking geodes. Each has a hole in the side; entry can be achieved quickly if one has metal boots because the geodes are magnetized.

The geodes' exteriors are comprised of phlogiston creosote. Inside them, they are crystal of essential salts. They are the suicide-sacrificed essence of a civilization crushed by those above and now their place of palingenesis.

Each geode has a flame in its core, like the core of the earth. You may step into this fire to add d8 souls to your body. These souls originate from this ancient civilization crushed by Asterica and its cohorts in ages long since passed. If you ask them, they will tell you it was called Orphicorum.

When you sleep for at least nine hours you may cede control of your body to one of these souls more suited to the situation (or deserving of a reward). You remain the primary soul and may always attempt to wrest control from the manifested soul, but doing this outside of a nine-hour sleep period will utterly destroy the controlling soul.

The Orphicorians dream of vengeance against the progeny of their old rivals, namely Asterica, Typhoea and Stygoziana. The souls may present a unified front in their goals and will remember it if you tyrannize them.

In addition to taking revenge on their destroyers, each soul will have a meta-objective from their life that they would like continued. They can guide you to caches of Orphicorum's wealth in exchange for carrying out their old missions.

Roll a d8 to determine each soul’s former profession: 

1 Sage, 2 Priest, 3 Soldier, 4 Mineralogist, 5 Fungicist, 6 Noble, 7 Slave, 8 Trapped Foreigner.

Next, roll a d8 to determine their life orientation:

1: Accelerationist millenarian: Seeks to connect the oil seas to magma flows.

2: Awakener: Seeks to make the earth’s ore veins incandescent and awaken the sleeping consciousness of the world, and believes that smelting ore will make it more stupid and violent when it awakens and should be minimized as such.

3: Core colonization advocate: Seeks infinite energy in the core of the Earth. Knows how to ward off the heat, pressure and creatures there.

4: Revanchist: Wants the players to conquer and colonize Stygoziana, Typhoea and Asterica in the style of Hernan Cortez and will reveal ancient weapon caches to aid you. 

5: Underworld megastructure colonist: Great works in the inner darkness of the earth similar to incomplete runic Dyson sphere plates near great magma pillars, an underworld sea sectioned into a steam engine, etc. Would like to recover these things

6: Petrified ecosystem cultivator: Seeks to awaken the biological potential of petrified bioforms (ie petrified wood) through cosmic ray bombardment; the idea being that they will produce petrified fruit et al with otherwise unachievable properties.

7: Mechanical computer denizen: Once lived in a mechanistic paradise that he or she will seek to recreate. This computer was built of fluid, machines and creatures, and involved many pumping, flooding and counting machines.

8: Outstation anchorite: These folks were notorious for the worship or propitiation of strange entities, elements, phenomena, etc. They will long to seek out their former masters and friends.

You still control your actions when another soul has manifested

However (and you won’t know this until it happens), a soul may go rogue while possessing you and you will need to make a Will check to reassert control; if you fail you may try again in an hour. Your companions will not necessarily know you have been shunted out of command.

The soul is likely to say to you, “I will do this thing and then give you back control. Forgive me but I have unfinished business with these vermin,” and will attempt to do something like flood Stygoziana, kill the Buddhic parasite of Typhoea, or set off the central powder magazine of Asterica, which will bring tectonic ruin to the entire region.

If any of these things happen and the Astericans, Typhoeans or Stygozianans know you did it, they will invade the surface.

Otherwise, they will invade one another in a nightmare war of shadowy screaming death and atrocity and your only escape route will be filled with the clashing of armies and their subterranean superweapons.

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