The Campaign Builder's Guild

[ooc]My cretinous players all of a sudden want to play GURPS, a rules system I haven't touched in years. They also want yet another original setting because, you know, I'm their dancing monkey. Sigh...[/ooc]

VERDIGRIS
Ancient humanity was slowly swallowed up by the hungry hateful earth. The defiant warlocks built a grand/terrible machine and filled it with the children and infants of our race. They cast the machine into the void.

That machine, called verdigris, was woven with riddles and confusions of time so that a thousand years might pass as a moment. The machine travelled far into the dark with its dreaming cargo.

SPERMATAZOON
The terrible machine spread its seed on whatever world it found. In fertile places there was life. Such a seed fell upon this world and that is why there is the city and the war.

THE MYTH OF A THOUSAND YEARS
The tyrant Zantaluph and all his sons (and theirs) demand that you forget... REMEMBER! The wizards of Nulf and Cantree and the twelve beggar states drew blood sigils in the dust of their newborn world. They learned their magic from the old machine. Its first use was blood and our inheritance is blood. That is the truth of the first thousand years. BUT ZANTALUPH SAYS PEACE! Ever was there peace and ever shall be peace. That is the myth of a thousand years.

MAGIC
It is the corrupt who best wield magic. This says nothing of the art itself '" which is as innocent as any unmarred blade '" it speaks only of human desire.

The classes of magic are thus:

BLOOD MAGIC
Properly the magic of all living fluids. It is used in all lower summonings, and the luring of beasts.

NECROMANCY
The shallow sorcery of whispering cadavers and staggering shades.

DIVINATION
The magic of secrets and fascinations and yearnings.

DARK MAGIC
The magic of lust and consumption and death. The alleys are filled with it. In the sun's harsh light we hide it away in our breasts where it festers and burns.

ALCHEMY
The magic of chemicals and reagents and reactions. Its waste pollutes our streets. It mingles and merges with all the human and beastly effluvium and takes unwholesome shape. Threaded between cobblestones is an ocean of miracles.

THEURGY
Prayers offered to the gods. Our gods have no strength. (What strength is there in homesick madness?) The gods of our invaders fear and loathe our heathen souls.

Here are the human gods:

THE ARROGANT MAN
In whose sight none are worthy. He is always demanding blood from his priests. From their sons and daughters. From their enemies. He wears the mask of a beast and behind that a human face and behind that another beast. His blessings are not so different from his curses.

THE MANY-ARMED WOMAN
Who grasps in every direction bringing all to her bosom. Her heart is filled with a palpating silence. Her priests praise her by turns with wild ululations and whispers.

ALL THE FALLEN GODS
Slowly humanity casts off its erstwhile protectors. There are great piles of discarded effigies at the limits of our cities The pious keep their idols hidden prudently away.

Here are the alien gods:

THE LOCUST
That drifts beyond the airless sky in gruesome multitudes. It rains down its seeds as once did the terrible machine. It is said that the imagos fear their creator much as we fear the arrogant man, who is our destroyer. We do not know if this is true.

THE SECONDBORN
That fills heaven with its grey threaded wings. It hunts the children of the locust though it is itself of the locust. In the swollen pillar of its body gestates the third race who would be the enemy of humans and imagos alike. Wherever it sprouts it is ruthlessly destroyed by both our race and theirs.

AN ALIEN EARTH
Of endless spiny mountains swollen with gas and eructations of thunder. We know this by the dreams that assail us when the imagos stray too close.

These other things are of importance:

THE EASTERN COUNTRIES
Are Lumull and Dirradamull and Presha and Zyll. Lumull is easternmost. It and Zyyll face the green sea of Undborr. The city of Arruntulla is in Lumull but is has been disowned by the nation's cautious ministers. Arruntulla is rotten to its core.

THE GREEN SEA UNDBORR
Is filled with renegade wizards who have been banished from all lands. And there are traitorous humans who have allied themselves with the imagos of the sea. There are also the hundreds of naval craft (from recommissioned fishing boats to the perilous juggernauts that swallow storms and bellow steam and lightning) that make war against the navies of the other continent.

THE OTHER CONTINENT
Was born from the second seed of verdigris. It too contends with the ever-falling imagos. The nations of Zyyll and Mumull and their ilk are older and more loathsome foes than any alien. We will not speak more of this continent here.

THE WANING DYNASTY OF ZANTALUPH
Clings to its imperial title. The price has been both its pride and its power. It lends no strength in the wars with the other continent and it receives no tithes from its territories.

[ooc]Up next:

THAT DESPICABLE CITY![/ooc]

Cretinous fools.  Don't they know what they are tempting???

Love the Secondborn.  I can imagine this being spouted out by some crazed seer of an enemy of the world...  

BASTARDS[/i]
One burning summer day the prefects of Arruntulla went mad. They gathered up all the diplomats of Dirradamull and Presha and Zyyll and hanged them. Sympathisers were killed in the streets with butcher's tools and hammers and ropes. Others were chased into the sea.

That was cause enough for war between the eastern countries. The queen of Lumull disowned the city so that its evils were not the evils of her nation. This saved Lumull from destruction. The prefects of Arruntulla are free to gnaw their city apart like demented rats.

ORDER[/i]
Some idiots will say that liberty is the city's law. The Tower College is filled with philosophers whose masturbations are in service to this dictum.

Killers like Nom Lippor and Grammangele claim to be the city's law. They hang politickers and prophets and immigrants of suspicious character. Their talonguns are restless in their sheaths.

This city of evil men and women survives because all human evil is the same. There is only one hunger.

SLAVES[/i]
A prophet said ALL MEN ARE FREE. We bound him to a rock in the square, the better to hear his wisdom. He was eaten by the birds, who took up his chant. They sing it even now in the crenellations and the eaves. Birds are fools.

More slaves are always coming from across the sea. They are the other continent's people. Many are from the war. Better are the ones traded from their lands' own slavers '" healthy women and boys and girls fit for workhouses and laboratories and brothels.

Arruntulla is the lover of all people. It cares nothing for the nature of their blood. There are slaves who have become lords in this city. They have summoned demons against the whole blessed world.

ALIENS[/i]
Spores are always falling like a rain of white ash. They become the clattering juveniles that weave themselves cocoons and emerge as imagos. Their bodies are slender and curving with long fragile arms. They have big clear pointed wings like soft glass. We do not hear them in the air but in our minds. Their language is a discomfiting music such as a murderer might whistle in the dark.

WIZARDS[/i]
Any lunatic may become a wizard. It is only a matter of greed. The city is filled with societies of fiends who would gut a beggar and rummage in his belly for secrets. There are books that tell how to read a person's soul by their tears or urine or sperm. You can bind the human will with mere contraptions of wire.

[ooc]Up next:

Wizards are the city's villains and bogeymen. Here are some of the worst...[/ooc]

I'm always struck by your turn of phrase, how your writing drives a wedge between minimally descriptive and maximally evocative. It's a trick I've never mastered, and I'm always envious.

I've been fascinated to watch the arc of your writing's progress, ever since we first started corresponding on some other website, years ago. It was really good then, but you've markedly improved it since.

Necromancy? Dark Magic? Alchemy? Fallen Gods? Lunatic Wizards?

Epic.

Very evocative, very interesting. I like the bit on the fallen gods, in particular; remnants of something that once was.

That said, the name kind of bugs me a little. It strikes me as something that would end up on MTS3k.

Quote from: OMGAHORSE!Necromancy? Dark Magic? Alchemy? Fallen Gods? Lunatic Wizards?

That said, the name kind of bugs me a little. It strikes me as something that would end up on MTS3k.[/quote]It's an odd name, yes. It actually inspired the whole setting: it sprang into my head all of a sudden and I was like "what's that all about"?

Wizards are the city's villains and bogeymen. Here are some of the worst:

SIX-EYED KLEAMANDA[/i]
Two are his own and four were stolen from nameless faces. He seeks the dutiful and devout. He knows that the world's evil is only a reflection of the purity of the gods. He seeks that purity in the eyes of the truly faithful, for miracles are born from honest faith. Soon he shall be Seven-eyed Kleamanda.

MADDE THE SLUT[/i]
In this city whores do not suffer the usual shame. Lust is expected (some say it is required) in a citizen: lust for sex or pain or noise or dirt or other strange delights. There is a whore for every  indulgence. Madde is the worst and best of whores. She serves the lunatics who dream of death, whose loins spring at the thought of blood and breaking and ruin, who wish to survive and remember their own ends. Her magic is very old. In another time she may have been a keeper of deepest mysteries. The city demands other things of her.

THE GIBBOUS STREET LOT[/i]
Prudent oracles do their magic in dark places. They leave no witnesses to their secret futures. The Gibbous Street Lot are not prudent. They are the insipid daughters and sons of merchants. They do divinations amid crowds and share the fate of one with all. They laugh at the many-armed woman and spurn the arrogant man. For this they will be punished with knives and fire.

YGORN[/i]
Dark magic is the short bloody path to freedom. Any liberated slave is its student. Ygorn has polluted his soul with it and is hardly recognisable as a man. He has stolen lovers and driven rivals mad. His first master burned himself alive. The second impaled herself upon the Ashen Towers and her children were sold to the warlords of the sea. Ygorn is the spool on which a thousand lives are woven and stained red. He is still a slave.

GIGGLING ELLEARLEY[/i]
There are true shapes and there are false shapes. Falsehoods may be altered but truths shall endure, and this is the way of alchemy. Ellearley will not accept this. Do not the imagos subscribe to different truths? Was the world not a different thing before us, and them, and the war? She will tear apart the tapestry of our vulgar fiction.

NUSTILLEN FYY[/i]
We brought all the shadows and insanities of earth with us. They are smouldering, hungering things. They are bloated dogs and starving birds and weeping bleeding infants. Nustillen Fyy baits them with sex and stink and gore. He traps them in phials and humming machines. He teaches them despair and revenge.

THOSE DAMNABLE ALIENISTS[/i]
The imagos possess a different magic. It is like a germ finding purchase in the soul and blossoming into thought and unfamiliar deed. The alienists do not announce themselves, and seem like humans. They believe in the locust and their enemy is the secondborn. Or they believe in the secondborn and their enemy is the locust. They can fill our minds with nightmares. They are no longer people.

THE LIBERTINE COURT[/i]
Though it is a lawless city it will not condone every atrocity. It is already groaning and splitting with excess. The Libertine Court says that is insufficient. They draw on every damnable secret and degenerate philosophy. They drink poisons like wine and mould their own bones like clay. They rape the young. They rape the city. They are going wilfully into the dark.

[ooc]I wanted to make these characters seem thoroughly fallen without being insane (the Libertine Court are an arguable exception). You can decide how successful I was.

Up Next:

SPELLS, PRAYERS AND FORGOTTEN FORMULAE[/ooc]

"in a mad world only the mad are sane".
In many ways these characters seem insane, but there is a pattern or system to the insanity which makes them seem more like zealots or visionaries than delirious madmen.
I like them. Nustillen is probably my favorite, while I can't quite figure out what Ygorn is on about?
The Libertine Court actually seems less insane than many of the others although more malicious; violent anarchic hedonists by the looks of it.

Hmm, you say that this is for a game with your friends; is this also the format you present the setting information to them in? Or do you flesh it out a bit more after you've set the tone with this?  

Hmm, good points.

The way I normally go about it is to present the setting as written then flesh it out based on player interpretation. For instance Giggling Ellearly is the only one with anything like a coherent motive, and even that doesn't really describe her personality. You may also note that they have no physical descriptions, save that Kleamanda has six eyes and Ygorn is probably from the other continent.

Ygorn will make more sense once I've written up the Dark Magic spells (Dark Magic messes with human emotion and desire and destiny). The last sentence of his description can mean many things.

Are your players supposed to pick between the Wizards (them being the "protagonists")?

Not necessarily. They appreciate it when I provide thematically potent characters that they can elect to play, but I don't expect them to choose pregens. (Any character they don't choose, I get to play, so it's win-win) It always helps to clarify the sort of personalities the setting is filled with though.

Great work, as always, and I have to agree with LC about your writing style - much as I love the kind of sprawling, adjective-heavy "weird fiction" type prose (my own output is almost exclusively in this vein :P) that you once used, I think you've definitely struck an interesting balance now; somehow rich in its very sparseness, and very impressive indeed.

On less of a technical note, I would be very interested to hear how the setting turns out in actual play. If you'd have any interest in writing up, however briefly, a session or two when you've started to run the setting, I would like to read. On the other hand I completely understand if that's asking too much - I don't think it's something I'd enjoy doing too much for a game I was running.

Something that slightly confused me in my reading... Humans worship these gods but the gods have no power... Is that saying the gods exist or are they just fictional. And if thats the case do the alien gods exist? And do they have some kind of omnipotent power? Sorry if these questions were answered else where that i didnt see.

Quote

QuoteHumans worship these gods but the gods have no power...

Is that saying the gods exist or are they just fictional. And if thats the case do the alien gods exist? And do they have some kind of omnipotent power?

Perhaps all of the beings in this world I am inventing possess an omnipotent power. Gasp! Setting idea!

I see what you mean about the setting name, it's been rattling around in my head for the last few days since I read it, just popping up as a phrase between each batch of more coherent thoughts. Which is... interesting.

PS. No comment on the idea of posting a write-up of play in the setting?

That would be a groovy idea, Kindling. I'll do that.

FOR BECKONING SHADOWS[/b]
You can kick a human and spit in her face and call her an animal and sometimes she will believe it. This is how we forge the best of slaves. Even so she will always be a human no matter how far she lowers herself [this is debatable]. An animal can be made less than an animal. It can forget the warmth of its own blood and the weight of its own bones. It can forget that it is itself and eat its own body like a stranger. These are the things that live in the hollows beneath our cities or in the middens and shadowed cages where vulgar humans nurture their creeping hate.

Cut yourself and bleed in some forgotten depth of the city and doubtless a wretched thing will feed on it when you are gone. Most shadows are lured by blood. Rats black and bony like four-branched twigs, hairless cats with two feuding faces, dogs with feet tangled in their own cottony guts. Go often to the same dark place and bleed and soon they will have a taste for you. Be ready for them lest they take you in the night.

There are fiercer shadows with more disturbing appetites. Their madness accomplishes some wild artistry. They yearn to share their hungers and join death and blood with humid ecstasy. These are the things that might have been human had they not forsaken that right at the commencment of their lives. Some of them have grown despite this, into strange visions of maturity. Others are ageless infants suspended in wine-red amnion. The greater shadows dream of lust, of gory union and sexual desecration. They are lured by sex and its emissions. They reek of fornication.

FOR SUMMONING INSANITIES[/b]
As a kindness to you I will not speak of the summoning of insanities. You are an idiot and will call them to you and they will fill you will such a strangeness that you will deny the world, and the war, and the plight of all races.

FOR REPELLING INSANITIES[/b]
Insanities can be repelled easily. Make the circle and trigram of the eighth forgotten engine and surround it with four murdered humans. Paint the shape of the arrogant man on your breast and raise up your sword stained with the blood of your victims. When the insanity comes you must cut off its head, then sever its five flailing arms. There are countless other ways but they will all damn you.

FOR COMPELLING THE SPEECH OF CORPSES[/b]
Only the very recently dead can be compelled thus. Grasp the dead one's tongue with a hand smothered with your own spittle. Trace a sign of knowing on the corpse's brow. The wretch will speak if its apparatus is intact. It will be wakeful for no more than a minute and can only speak of its mortal life. There is no other. You can also compel the dead one to speak with your own organs by grasping its trachea in your hand. The criterion of freshness remains.

FOR KILLING A CHILD IN THE WOMB[/b]
The anppara plant will induce miscarriage in any mammal. The women of the other continent know many secret remedies as well. You do not need me to tell you how to kill a foetus with herbs and potions.

To kill a child without such devices you must first procure an already miscarried foetus. It need not be fresh but it must have a great deal of its flesh upon it. Dissolve and divide the corpse's constituents as it is explained in the book of tender alchemies. From the oily element distil the fuel and burn it in a sealed room so that the fumes do not escape. Inhale as much as you can. Now that the death is in you it can be transmitted to another. Beware: it will infect the very first woman so touched whether or not she is currently with child. Woman cannot work this magic except as its inevitable subject.

FOR RETURNING THE DEAD TO LIFE[/b]
This dream has cursed more souls than any other. I will not perpetuate it.

FOR INSPIRING LOVE[/b]
Smear your sexual emissions upon an effigy of your paramour. Burn the effigy and collect the ashes in a ceramic container. Bury the container and pour your blood on the spot every night. A curiosity will rise in them which may be nurtured into love. This is a corruption of love and will end poorly for you.

FOR IGNITING HATE[/b]
The book of fears lists a hundred magics for creating hatred in a human. None of these spells can be undone without great cost to their creator. Find the book and learn this for yourself.

FOR KNOWING HUMAN FUTURES[/b]
There are many ways to do this: Mix the subject's blood with the reagent of eager colours and drink it to inspire a discordant dream of their lifetime. Devise a machine of lenses and gilded mirrors through which their future image can be seen (and perhaps stolen). Capture a ravenous shadow and torture such knowledge from their flesh. And there are other ways. By participating in the futures of others you will lose your present self. I do not know what that means.

FOR TRANSFORMING BODIES[/b]
Every shape-shifting alchemist has formula of their own. All are gruesome to behold. No transformation is clean or swift. It is a refitting and realignment of bones and tissues and a careful balancing of hormones and humours. It is agonising and very risky. For some it is an art.

Deliciously evil rituals!  Love the secretion imagery that seems to pervade.

Thanks. Wizards are a sputtering, leaking, oozing sort of people.