The Campaign Builder's Guild

(Removed for now... I might be submitting a couple of these...)

The above is a short story set in my major setting, The Cadaverous Earth.  It's an attempt to write a story in the pulp tradition of Robert E. Howard (Conan, Soloman Kane, etc) and so has his idiosyncratic style and tone very much in mind, though hopefully remaining uniquely CE; as a result the feel is partly one of straightforward morality typical of a lot of sword and sorcery pulp fiction - the imposition of its rather unpleasant, even brutish protagonist who nonetheless is cast as a heroic crusader of Justice and Freedom etc etc.

Comments, critique, questions, or suggestions are all welcome.  I plan to eventually write more stories set in CE (probably not in the same vein), and when I do I'll post them here.

Pretty great. Caught my attention and held on to it, even as it changed tone and scenery from stealthy crusade, to the intrigues of the famined Yatahi and on to the dungeon-like last chapter. It all fitted together nicely, and you managed to cover all the holes (like why he went deeper into the Crypt when he had what he wanted).
Other than their bizarre forms, demons seem pretty mortal though. They are fast and strong and odd, but seem to react to blades like anything else would and the last one barely seemed to be more than a powerful animal. I don't mind it at all, they are pretty cool no matter what, but what were your thoughts behind their design, powers and such?
Also nice to see that there is room for compassion in the CE (Para). Sometimes it can be hard to spot the points of light in a world that is so dark.  

Thanks for the feedback, Cataclysmic Crow!

I see what you mean about the demon being essentially a powerful animal.  I'd imagine the demon slain was still relatively weak compared to some of the more powerful creatures out there who might be harder to kill (perhaps more like the Slake Moths of Bas-Lag), but ultimately for the purposes of this story I needed an enemy that our Beowulf-esque hero could slay with brawn and naked steel, in the usual S&S tradition.  I wanted something like a minor shoggoth - unfathomable and alien and grotesque, but not immortal.  It is worth noting that the word "demon" in CE can refer to a whole host of creatures from other dimensions/realities - basically "outsiders" in DnD terms, although the multiverse of CE, such as it is, is more Lovecraftian/Netherworldly than the Wheel's more varied cosmology.  Demons aren't immortals or quasi-divine powers, they're just extraplanar - in some senses almost more kin to the pan-dimensional invaders of the Half-Life series than fallen angels or embodiments of Evil.

I realized that my italics didn't transfer when I copy/pasted the story, so if you see something in first person, it's meant to be in italics - I'm correcting them now, but some might have slipped past.

The pulp styled prose is awesomely executed, invoking the feel of the stories of REH and CAS. The horror elements work well in the first part; the finale in the necropolis seems less effective, while the scenes in the Jatayi nest are largely devoid of horror (which is for the better, as it provides a moment of calm between the more intense sections). The ending was ok, but might have been more effective had the ultimate fate of the monster been left less certain, or some unforeseen consequences been hinted at.

I'm not very fond of the more heroic motivations of the protagonist. It's basically taking one of the least appealing tropes of classical S&S fiction and placing it in a setting where it seems particularly out of place. I think the plot would have worked better as a simple matter of vengeance. Even more of a peeve is the fate of the slaves. I could accept the "noble savage" guy with a dislike for slavery, but having the rampaging demon just happen to ignore them so they can be freed? That was the weakest moment of the story for me.

Hm, reading now what I just wrote above, it seems to come out overly negative. I did enjoyed the tale despite it's shortcomings. Very entertaining, and I love the prose. Wouldn't mind reading more from you in a similar style - set in the Cadaverous Earth or not.

I agree with you about the protagonist not being the best.  I was originally writing the story with an eye to submitting to an ezine (now defunct, I've discovered - or I think it's defunct) whose criteria specifically called for "no anti-heroes; forces of good triumphing unambiguously over those of evil."  I took that as a kind of bizarre challenge because personally I find anti-heroes and morally gray endings much easier to write.

The slaves thing is a little worrying; I figured it was the cages that saved them, but that is a tad implausible.  I could just kill the slaves, I suppose...

Anyway, thanks very much for the feedback, and I'm glad the style resonates - I feel that's my strength, so glad to see the feel of S&S is conveyed.  Thanks very much for reading!

I have looked into the Cadaverous Earth before, but never this, and I like it alot. It really kept me reading, although the main character, Talos, has some confusing morals.

[ic=Hung-Over in the City of Cosmic Dregs]I woke up with a pain like some kind of demoniac larva was trying to birth itself through my forehead.  Nothing like a good hangover to hammer home that you're no longer a god.  Well, demigod, anyway.

I stretched limbs battered an unwholesome purple.  I was sore as well as hung-over: last night (well, what passes for night in this place) I'd been boxing down at a club on Skelter Street, a murky little joint run by some sort of vampiric fungus-man called Rank.  I'd won the fight '" the thing I was boxing was an insectile ghoul that laughed like a lunatic while I pulverized it in the ring, in a room that stank of hookah smoke and spores '" but I'd been pummeled pretty badly in the first few rounds.  I'm a brawler: I have to get in close, and this guy, whatever it was, had kept me at a distance, raking the air with those scraggly chitin-plated arms and giggling like a little kid.  Really threw me, you know?

That's the thing about Saint Echidna: you just never get properly used to it.  You think you've seen it all, and then an alleyway vomits up a new curiosity, or one of the trans-reality orifices yawns open and sluices more detritus down into the muck, and the city that rises out of it.  The City of Weird Shit, they call it; Reality's Sewer.  The City of Cosmic Dregs.

It's often been compared to Nexus City, in the sheer variegation of its populace and its cultures, but where the trans-reality hub is an interstice for every layer, modality, universe, plane etcetera, Saint Echidna is the multiversal dumping ground: a haven for scum and outcasts, the dispossessed, the effluvium of the infinity of worlds called the Grand Myriad.  A carnival cesspool.

I mean don't get me wrong, you get used to some of it: the huge eyes that blink down from the sky in place of stars, for example (actually, the whole city seems to have a subtle obsession with eyes, don't ask me why), or the tentacled rats, or the anthropomorphic architecture, or how every street-name begins with the letter S.  It's been seven years since I arrived here, dropped in the scabrous docklands where the maggotfolk stevedores haul freight and broken godlings like me come for our inglorious semi-retirements, washed up on the shore like so much flotsam and jetsam.  I pulled in from the Plasm Sea on an ugly galleon, the Uninhibited, crewed by a leathery bunch that whirred with clockwork prosthetics and chain-smoked indigo cigarillos that stained the ship and their own skins and teeth an eerie blue.  In between smokes and off-colour jokes they told me about the city: how it was founded by a band of demons exiled from their own Hell, or perhaps by the mad, slumbering fish-deity Isserachab that dreamed the city out of the amoebic oceans, or how it used to be a gigantic trans-reality vessel and crash-landed after a battle with an armada of air-going crustaceans.  About the bloodsucking police and the metameric street-toughs with engraved shell segments and the tissue parlors where the skin-tailors could fix you up with some serious organic weaponry, or else just switch your skin with scales, or whatever.  About how everything seems to be alive in Saint Echidna, and how most of it is seriously fucked up.

Back then, I thought almost everything about the city was weird: the clothes (still haven't got used to Flense! Fashion), the food (so much of it still-living, or else too rotten to eat), the 'people.'  The only term to adequately describe the massed canaille of the city is the nebulous category of 'things.'  There are the polyps, of course, and the shuddersome Yolgs with their spidery fingers and their noisy mastications, and the Unspawn, immortal neotenic imps with too-large heads, looking disturbingly like oversized humanoid embryos.  Some claim they're the shades of stillborn infants, others a race of rebellious matricides that tore their way from a primordial womb before their gestation was complete, unwilling to submit to the ephemeral phases of birth and senescence.  There are the glistening parasitic fruit, and the Ulghir, a strain of cadaverous bricoleurs who build their pastiche bodies out of scavenged bones and carrion, lumbering like macabre hermit crabs, clustering on street corners to compare their grotesque, skeletal bodies.  There are psychic cetaceans that roam about Saint Echidna in huge glass fish-tanks, and shapeshifting mischief-makers whose pranks are sometimes deadly but usually just outrageously unhygienic, and the jewel-loving Xerxerii.  Too many to keep track of.

I wiped rheum from my eyes and set about looking for something to eat, and maybe something to take the edge off my headache.  My place was sort of a mess.  I crushed a couple of things somewhere between snails and mice that have been infesting my home recently; they screamed a little when I mashed their shells under my boots (big, black, hobnailed things I've had since I moved here that I managed to get classified as footwear rather than weapons by the Powers That Be).  I peeked out through an ovoid window, trying to see what time it was: up through the cobweb-crazy weft of cables above, trying to discern the colour of the sky.  Grayish-pink, leprous clouds, wan, pasty eyelight low on the horizon, somewhere.  Could be anytime.  The 'sun' blinked a couple times, and the dawn/dusk flickered briefly into night while the lids were closed.

My still-bleary eyes settled on a pack of smokes '" oh sweet salvation! '" and I muttered a quick incantation to conjure a tongue of purple flame.  The spell was learned, not intrinsic: I lost most of my powers when they expelled me from the pantheon.  I'm not totally meat though: still a little Essence there.  I'm hoping it'll help stave off lung cancer, because I smoke a pack a day now, and the cigarettes down in Saint Echidna are packed fuller of toxic shit than any other city in the Myriad.  The advertisements practically brag about it; Saint Echidna's a decadent sort of place, and the closest it comes to real refinement is made manifest in the elegant self-destruction popular amongst the well-heeled, those ironic debauchees with their tinted glasses and their expensive body modifications, deformity-chic.  The vast bulk of the entertainment is either of the sleazy, sexual variety (the glittering skin parlors down on Sacral Row or Salacious Avenue, for example) or a bloodsport of one type or another.  Hence the boxing '" not the worst trade for an ex-god of battle.

I smoked two of the cigarettes and got some caustic green liquor down from my cabinet.  Some sort of absinthe, I think.  I mixed it with hot sauce, salt, and a raw egg and downed it in a gulp: what some Echidnans call a Green Eyeball, because of the way the egg looks (and there's that ocular fixation again!).  Its phlegmy consistency leaves a lot to be desired, but it's not a bad hangover cure.  They say it was invented in a saloon on the Plains of Mutancy, but like most origin stories in this place, that probably can't be trusted.

Okay: hair of the dog, check.  Time to scrounge some edibles.  I didn't feel much like cooking (and those snail-mice-things had run amok in my pantry, left everything half-nibbled anyway, and slimy to boot) so I decided to take a stroll and head down to Borborygmus.  I stuffed a wad of bills into my pocket, pulled on a tatterdemalion shirt and stumbled out into the half-light.

Hmm: junkies on cycles whizzing down the sidewalks, a couple of frayed teenage humanoids shambling zombic and sweat-stained down the street with the dazed, half-deaf look of all-night party-goers '" definitely morning, not evening.  I live on Sallow Street, a couple blocks from the canal; the buildings there slouch into one another, tottering like drunks, facades sloughing away to reveal the bricks beneath, plaster mottled with mildew, windows boarded up or clouded gray like they've got cataracts.  Not the snazziest digs in Saint Echidna, but cheap, and surprisingly low on violent crime '" not that I can't handle myself, of course.  Anyway, not exactly the most salubrious of neighborhoods, but the best I could do given my sporadic income.  It was gradually becoming home '" though it was taking its time.  The graffiti's pretty decent, at least: I walked past a faded wall-mural of an acid green, six-armed nude, androgynously sensual, adjacent to a thirteen-line poem scrawled in an indecipherable but beautifully cursive street dialect.

Borborygmus is perched over the canal on stilts, a greasy, borderline-dilapidated diner with just the right amount of kitsch: retro posters slathered on the walls, bits and pieces of campy bric-a-brac peering down from rounded corners.  Even when you don't get the references there's a sort of friendly zaniness to the place; you walk in and you feel like you're in on a joke, even if you don't quite grasp it.  I like it, anyway, though it makes me feel a bit nostalgic sometimes, and that can be dangerous for me.

I sat by my usual window and lit another cigarette while I waited for a waitress to appear.  Outside a couple of reptilian guys were fishing for scrap in the canal, hauling out gears and busted-looking miscellanea from the sticky ooze.  No water in the Plasm Sea: just a gelatinous mass of viscous semi-fluid that looks a lot like a macrocosmic version of a cell, complete with tribes of bickering, giant-sized organelles/protozoans called blobfish.

Zedda floated over to my table.

'What'll it be, Enu?'  That's my name, by the way.  They know me at Borborygmus; I suppose you could call me a regular, although words like 'regular' don't usually apply in Saint Echidna.

'Usual.'  That meant a shank of seared bacon (well, I thought of it like bacon), some chewy things that you could pretend were scrambled eggs if you closed your eyes and ignored the faintly rancid smell, and a cup of honeyed marrowtea, which is about the closest you can get to coffee in this damned city.

'Coming right up.'  She smiled, flashing sharp teeth, and glided over to the kitchen, where the cook '" a foul-mouthed fissionist called Shebb '" was crisping up caterpillars on the griddle.  Their frying chitin popped and sizzled.

I took a long drag and looked the other customers over while I waited for my breakfast to appear.  A couple of shadowy guys in oversized trenchcoats whispering melodramatically to one another; a thing with sucker-pads on its face that stirred a congealing drink with obvious ennui; a girl with blue skin and a lot of pale, silvery tattoos, or maybe veins, that formed a baroque subcutaneous latticework.  She slouched in her seat and read the paper.

I could hear the distant rattle of trains overhead, reminding me vaguely of the war-chimes that had rung with a sound like a choir of bloodthirsty angels back in my palace, in the bad old days.  It was about then that I got a familiar clenching feeling in my gut, one that had nothing to do with my hangover.

The doors swung open and the creature oozed into the diner.  It was a bit like a slug, but bigger, and radiating instant waves of menace.  No words (well, none that I heard), no warnings, just a nasty gargle hello, and then the thing opened up.  Flickering extrusions snickered out from its back and sides, amorphous appendages that suddenly elongated, coagulated into hard, barbed tendrils, and shot out with uncanny speed, hypertrophying across the room.  One skewered the trenchcoated guys in a spray of iridescent blood and gray-brown cloth; the second took Zedda through the throat.  She dropped her tray of hot drinks with a choking sound and collapsed in a thrumming heap on the floor, levitation permanently quelled.

A third limb snaked out towards me, mercurial, darting with a probing, liquid quickness towards my head.  Not fast enough for me, even hung-over.  Not nearly fast enough.  I caught the limb a few inches away from my face and broke it off at the joint, squirting the diner with a throbbing gush of noxious, translucent fluid.  My attacker recognized the threat quickly and detached the corpses from its other claws, shooting them out towards me instead, but I was already moving.  My fists clenched.  I felt a perverse urge to laugh; maybe I'd picked it up from that godsdamn bug-thing I'd fought the night before.  Or maybe the city was finally getting to me.

I was up next to it fast, ducking under those wicked barbs and up close, where I needed to be, nice and intimate.  I usually can't summon that much energy, but my blood was up and I was pissed.  Pissed at Saint Echidna, pissed at my wretched, broken-down excuse of a life, and most of all, pissed at the slimy bastard that had just spoiled my breakfast.

I have a pretty legendary temper, actually.

'Barge into my favorite place?'  My first punch broke the assailant's membranous outer-shell.  'Kill my favorite bloody waitress?'  The second splashed me with a burst of its bilious juices, but I was beyond caring.  Its limbs were flailing wildly.  'I'd barely sat down, you ugly fuck!'  It squealed from some unseen orifice.  'Can't a guy have breakfast in this town without some jellied piece of shit waltzing in and fucking up the place?  Huh?  HUH?!'

I kept punching for awhile, and berating the dying thing.  It probably couldn't understand me in the first place, and it was dead long before I'd finished, but whatever; I needed to vent a little.  Finally I drew myself up from the runny mess I'd made and breathed deep.  I hadn't lost it like that in awhile.  Felt pretty good, actually; cathartic.  On the other hand, it made me miss the old days again, and my weapons.  Can't use them, or any weapons, now: condition of my parole.  Plain old-fashioned killing, though, that's fine '" so long as I do it bare-knuckled.  Disallowing that would have been a death sentence in this place.

I don't get the shakes '" perk of being a battle-god, even a deposed one '" but I lit another cigarette anyway.  Gods but that thing stank.  What in all the Hells was it'¦?

'Yhullish hit-beast,' Shebb said, lumbering over towards me and staring at what I'd left of our mutual would-be assassin.  'One of the cystfolk subspecies.  Not smart, but quick and deadly.  Good thing you were here, En.'

'Yeah.  No problem.  I was in a bit of a mood, sort of caught me at the wrong time, you know?'  I exhaled sepia smoke.  'Any idea why this thing would attack the diner?  You do something to piss off some cystfolk?'

'Nah.'  Shebb shook his wedge-like head.  'This strain is solitary; doesn't clump into groups of its own kind, don't ask me why.  Probably mercenary.'

The doors clanked.  Looked like the blue girl and mister tentacles had booked it.  Shebb mumbled something about customers, mixed in with a lot of rapid-fire cursing.

'Mercenary, eh?  So who hired this guy?'

'Fuck if I know.  I pay my rent and my protection every month.  I haven't even poisoned anyone with the food recently.'

'Old enemy?'

'Maybe.  Or maybe the diner wasn't the target.  Maybe someone in it was.'

He let the implication sink in, threw me an apologetic but firm look that said, 'I like you, and I appreciate your custom, but I can't afford your business, anymore.'

Another thing taken away from me, and I didn't even know why.  Another place I wasn't allowed to go.  One more little turd on the festering dung-heap the universe had piled onto my life.  Well, fuck it.  Time to draw a line in the sand.  Time to fight back.  Time to say no, I wasn't going quietly.  Time to stop being the fucking victim and dig my balls out of whatever crevice I'd been hiding them in for so long.

Time to find who hired this godsdamn blob, and set them straight.[/ic]

First part of a story I'm working on posted - just wanted to know what people thought of it.  Dunno if it'll get finished.  I decided to write something with no preconceived setting, and to try and let ideas flow as fast and thick as I could.  I started writing it after writing up some ideas for weird races in Silvercat's Interminent Brainshowers thread.

Glad you liked the other story, Survivorman.  Dubious morals are all over the place in CE; I certainly wouldn't call Talos moral by modern standards.  He was intended almost as a caricature of heroes like Conan and the like.

Bit of a warning: there's a fair bit of harsh language in the above, and if you're nauseated easily you might want to skip it.  Of course, a little nausea is intended.  Maybe I flatter myself.

Pretty nice Steerpike. I enjoy the imagery (eyes in the sky was fantastic). Made me wish it was the start of a novel :P

Hopefully they'll be another piece.

Loved the first post, Steerpike.  Really drives home the whole Fallen Rennaissance Pulp atmosphere of Cadaverous Earth. Not so much the hangover one, though.  Don't think it has the same dark energy as your third-person prose, and the character's narrative voice wasn't particularly striking.

Having said that I am still your favourite fan.  I will fight anyone who disgrees.  With knives.

Thanks, Llum and Salacious Angel!

Yeah, its one of my first real attempts to write first person.  Hard to straddle the line between flroid prose and colloquialism.  Glad you liked the eyes, though, Llum!

And Zeno Clash was great, wasn't it?

Blew my mind, sir, yes it did.

Just too goddamned short.

Apparently it was originally going to be a much grander RPG called Zenoizoik: Shattered Land (link to preview), but that got aborted in favor of Zeno Clash.  I'm holding out for a sequel to Zeno Clash set in the same world, but with a larger scope.

Haven't seen too much of your stuff round here lately.  Are you still gaming a lot?

Nice start. I'll be waiting for more :)