The Campaign Builder's Guild

[ooc]Added a new creature to the Inhumans post: the waxborn.  I think they're probably one of the more horrifying of my creatures.  They're based partially off Chaos Beasts.[/ooc]

Steerpike, I swear to you, if you ever want to publish this setting for real I will kiss a gorgon for the opportunity to illustrate it.

[ooc]Heh that would be seriously awesome.  From what I've seen of your illustrations you're very talented.[/ooc]

[ooc]Added a new character to the Characters post (same post as the Oneiroi), near the bottom: Vortenza, a lilix gunslinger.  She's a good example, I hope, of how I imagine "heroes" to function in this setting.  I also thought it was about time to write up a character who wasn't human or once-human.[/ooc]

[ooc]Another smallish update - a storiette in the Witchcraft post.  I felt I'd emphasized the demon-summoning or diabolical aspects of witchcraft in the Cadaverous Earth moreso than the biopunk/"graftpunk" elements, so this vignette is focused on those aspects of "magic."  Vance's magicians' creations and Mieville's Remade are the major inspirations for the graftpunk stuff.[/ooc]

[ooc]Some random, self-indulgent auto-criticism...

I was thinking about Vreeg's comment about eyes and I realized how much I do use ocular imagery, I think generally to express some shift in identity.  Ghilan have cat-slitted eyes, linking them with the night and with a sort of feline grace; geists, milky white eyes, suggesting blindness, motivelessness; shades (and gorgons), black eyes indicating death, shadows, the abyss; eidolons and haunts, green eyes, an eerie or uncanny quality (and for the eidolons a seductive one); zombies have wide and staring eyes, suggesting lack of conscious thought; cestoids, only rudimentary eyes, signifying their alien-ness; hagmen have beady eyes, similarly making them other; leechkin eyes are mentioned to highlight the absence of their mouths on their faces (the mouth/hand conflation representing the leechkin priveleging of deed over thought when under the spell of the thirst); lilix have a profusion of eyes, indicating the spider link but also suggesting intricacy; freedwomen in Dolmen tattoo extra eyes to signify class; subhuman slaves in Dolmen are near-blind, emphasizing powerlessness; the 'violet, doe-like' eyes of Gobble and Slake suggest their outward show of innocence and their intoxicating effect; the Goremother's eyes are 'huge, black, and idiotic,' indicating her fundamentally animal nature; the Scarred Gentleman are distinguished from one another by their eyes.  Nectar also makes a witch's eyes glow golden, suggesting the arcane/numinous but also tree sap.  The Sons of the Peacock tattoo themselves with eyes, and as scholars this seems to link them to knowledge, seeing-into-things.  I'm always describing windows as eyes, usually empty sockets, to link empty ruins to skulls.  I think my use of eyes is probably linked to the whole 'window of the soul' thing, but it was slightly bizarre to realize how much of a motif I was constructing here '" I was only pseudo-conscious of it at the time.  Eyes seem to show up a lot in the storiettes, too, like the staring infant's eyes of Rowan's creation in the recent vignette, or the glimpse of a soul in the eyes of the automaton in 'Mimesis' in the Skein post.  I was much more aware of creating patterns with things like blood (currency, impulse/instinct, animal urges) than with eyes.

EDIT: now I can't stop seeing them.  Skulls with carnelians or bloodstones in their sockets.   A "sudden cruelness about the eyes," to indicate a man's degeneration into one of the fetch.  An imp like a cherub with compound insect eyes.  The demon in "Inchoate" in the Moroi post that stares into the young witch's nectar-glowing eyes with a sublime and disturbing gaze, two voids.[/ooc]

[ooc]Another character added - Ezekiel Khaan, an eccentric witch who lives outside of Baranauskas and is kind of a macabre Willy Wonka figure, madcap and disturbed.[/ooc]

[ooc]Added a vignette to the opening, a rambling sort of chronicle of an adventurer's career.  Hopefully it serves as a nice sort of opening for the world.

EDIT: also added a bit on the Tallow Plains.  It's in the same post as the Slouching-devil Mountains.

I really need to put all this on the wiki...[/ooc]

[ooc]I was browsing TV Tropes and I came across a near-perfect description of what Cadaverous Earth essentially is: a Crapsack World with  Black and Gray Morality. The site also identifies the HL2 post-combine universe, the Warhammer 40K universe, Sin City, Sweeny Todd's London, Carnivale, Bladerunner's LA, and A Song of Ice and Fire as Crapsack worlds (most of which had some influence on the setting).[/ooc]

I'm thinking I bring over a couple of bottles of wine and we make crapsack vignettes and create a beautiful disgust, trainwreck bloody perfection of chaos and form.

[ooc]I do like myself a good drunken trainwreck.[/ooc]

[ooc]Yet another character added - a ghul vagrant/mystic called Old Gran Corpse.[/ooc]

[blockquote-DirectingGar](2) Many things other than money can be lost in the dim chance-houses of Pelloch, smoky halls where pirates and thieves and other gamblers the breadth of the Cadaverous Earth rub shoulders under the watchful eyes of Dame Fortune's Drakes, with their painted fingernails and porcelain masks and exotic weapons '" poison-needled rings, punching daggers, bladed bracers, serrated sabres, venom-glands, curved double-swords. The seventeen year-old rake and young magister who prefers only the name 'Gis' has lost his homunculus in a high-stakes Imbroglio match: after betting away his entire allowance (supplied to him by his father, who he refuses to name lest he taint his family honour), his jewelled duelling pistol, and his rings, Gis recklessly continued playing in a desperate bid to win back some of his belongings and so put his ward-bound demon, the imp Botys, into the pot. The small, rat-headed demoness was won in the final game by a hagman elder called Pelquefesch, the high-pontifex of Namoch in Lophius, an aspect whose portfolio includes concepts of death, luck, change, and transformation.

If he returns to Skein without his homunculus Gis will be disowned and cast out into the world without support '" he will have forfeited the right to call himself nobility. He needs to retrieve his homunculus somehow, but lacks funds to continue gambling and dares not try to steal Botys back. Thus, he is looking very desperately for help. Gis cannot offer an immediate monetary reward for the return of Botys simply because he gambled away all of his money, but he promises his eternal gratitude and a substantial reward (a thousand Skein crowns, equivalent to five thousand drachmi) which he will procure as soon as he returns to Skein and regains access to his father's funds; he also hints that he may find a place for anyone who serves him well in his family's personal retinue, if they wish it. To locate likely individuals to aid his cause Gis has his men prowling mercenary dens and casinos, but he can also be introduced directly '" a distraught-looking and disheveled wretch in stained finery, wringing his hands and muttering half-sobbed curses, attended by an imposing eunuch bodyguard with a huge scimitar. He is staying at The Wanton Cuttlefish, a disreputable inn in Skaumn, also on Crooked Finger.[/blockquote]

I did love this.  I had a much more normal simialr situation, where the PC's had to deal with an inveterate gambler and his son. but I love the cadaverous touch.   Who takes care of the young man, wjo watches over him for his father?

[ooc]I was going for a kind of Laertes-in-France idea, the idea that this is the first time this young nobleman has been out in the world unsupervised, and the first thing he does is get into major trouble.  He has a retinue with him but he's the highest ranking one.  Thinking about it now perhaps it would make sense to have someone older there with him from his father's household, even if they aren't an authority figure.  But as I'd written it it was kind of a "rich kid in Vegas" sort of thing, where a spoiled brat is let off the lesh for the first time and gets in way over his head.

Perhaps an interesting complication to the plot would be to introduce a spy sent by the father to discretely watch over Gis, as Polonius does with Laertes.    The spy would have to be dealt with (bribed, assassinated, evaded, or whatever) which would add a totally different angle to the otherwise straightforward chain of deals...[/ooc]

[ooc]A new race posted that's been alluded to since the beginning but never completely explored - the mantids, in some ways CE's version of the thri-kreen (though, I hope, quite different).[/ooc]