The Cadaverous Earth

[sparkletwist]

CE assumes more of a D&D ongoing campaign model, albeit in an especially hostile world.  In a CE campaign, I wouldn't want my players "conspiring" with me to give their characters a gruesome end, I'd want them to be fighting for gold and glory (or just their lives) in a world of horror and black adventure.

I said that the players would be working with you to put their characters in peril, not that they'd want them to meet a gruesome end. After all, isn't the fun of many RPGs putting characters in peril and then getting them out of that peril? The characters are still fighting for gold and glory, or their lives, just like you said. That doesn't mean the players necessarily need to be fighting too-- ultimately, after all, it's a collaborative effort and a game for fun. I realize that the GM is in the position to create challenges for the players, but the GM is also in the position to facilitate the story and the advancement of the characters.

I'll just leave it there because this is getting dangerously close to the debate I didn't want to have. :grin:

This is true, but I don't think mood and feel get "willed" onto the table per se - even if everyone is onboard with the idea of feeling vicariously horrified, horror still has to be cultivate or inculcated.

I agree, but I think this is true with or without any "narrativist" mechanics. For example, let's say a character is wandering around in the dark. It's fairly certain there are some sort of dangerous and awful things out there, and she can't see them. In a system where players have the power to do so, her player might decide she has some source of illumination. While that deflates this particular aspect of the horror, I think all it really takes is a player who is still on board with maintaining the feel-- she's going to have a flashlight, not a floodlight-- and a GM who can roll with it, describing the situation in more detail now that she has more light, but emphasizing the long shadows and dark corners that the light shining around creates.

[Kindling]

I would say, to make Lamentations work for CE...
- Keep your old rule that spells have to be renamed and refluffed
- Either get rid of treasure=XP or use the Hill Cantons variant where treasure becomes XP when spent, so that every obelus spent carousing grants 2xp, every obelus spent on training grants 1.5xp, and every obelus spent on gear grants 0.5xp
- Add races
- Rename the Elf and Dwarf classes to represent warrior-mage types and fighters that focus more on toughness and resilience than offensive power, respectively
- Add firearms
- Possibly make a couple of new classes, maybe... And/or ditch the Cleric.

[Dialexis]

Beyond interest in Crepuscle, I was wondering if you had any more information on the Gloom Coasts?

Figured I would repost/re-ask this question, as it may have been missed amid the recent flurry of posts on rules-platforms.

[Steerpike]

I think I had a write-up mostly done for them, but it'd be back on my old computer.  I've been meaning to go retreive some files from it, though, so I'll be sure to have a look.

[Dialexis]

Wundebar, I look forward to seeing them!

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Q: What type of political-judicial system did you have in mind for Erebh?

Similarly related to the Gloom Coasts, are there any prominent rivers/waterways/bays in the region? The description of the Crimson Emptiness and Mewling Moors don't suggest any, so I was wondering if all trade to/from Erebh relied on Marainein's port (and subsequent land caravans and occasional aeronautical vessel).

Your truly,
Another die-hard fan of CE

[Steerpike]

For Erebh, I think I was probably envisioning a kind of merchant oligarchy - likely not too different from Macellaria's very loose form of "government."

I wasn't imagining any major waterways through the Moors or the Emptiness, no - at least not in the default "present" of the setting.

Scanning up the thread I realized I'd talked about some files I was planning on scavenging.  I did get hold of those files (they're sitting on my new computer), so I can post those at some point :)

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Sounds good, on all accounts. I look forward to seeing said files!

[LD]

Very Lovecraft-esque. Steerpike hies hither to terra incognita to locate evidence of fabled files, filled with mysteries dark and majestic, ONLY TO NEVER RETURN!

[Rose-of-Vellum]

If there was a "like" button, I would have pressed it, Light Dragon. Twice.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

I dimly (and perhaps incorrectly) recall a post that described or listed notable currencies in the CE (e.g., Skein crowns, Macellaria obeloi). Is this a delusion, sign of early onset dementia, or symptom of sleep-deprivation? Or does such a post exist, here or on another thread?

[Steerpike]

I don't know if I actually ever made a proper post about all the different currencies.

I did scrounge up some of the files.  Here are some fragments.

[ic=Gloomwine]Fermented from the black grapes that grow from the strangling pitvines which cling to the sides of Abysm, gloomwine is a wine pitch black in colour.  Renowned for its complex, heady flvours and subtle bouquet, gloomwine is notorious for the intensely wretched hangovers which inevitably accompany its usage, spells of black despair which creep over those who indulge in the potent drink the morning after, a condition which lends the vintage its other nickname, sorrowine.  Despite these after-effects the wine remains popular amongst those who can afford it, especially those of a poetic or artistic temperament.  The finest brews are aged in casks made from Bloodwood trees: these particular vintages tend to make drinkers aggressive at the time of consumption.

A quasi-mystic order of warrior-monks (who dwell in a monastery on the edge of Abysm, east of Erebh), the Brotherhood of the Black Draught, make use of gloomwine in their martial art, the so-called the Melancholy Fist style.  The Brotherhood also happens to be the finest makers of Gloomwine in the world.  Their apprentices – young boys – are sent to harvest the gloomgrapes from the treacherous choking vines, while full Brothers actually make the brew.[/ic]

[ic=Gloom Coast]The miasmic south-western coast that runs from the Sallow Seas to the Leering Sea, the Gloom Coast is a place of haunted shoals and hidden inlets where hungry, once-human things squat in caves, a place where Rotmists have left the trees and grasses along the shore withered and putrefied and where flesh-eating tribes offer virgin babes and elderly souls to the deep to placate the Beast Gods and the strange, chitinous and fish-headed beings that do their bidding.  Marainien is the closest thing to a safe haven: a dour, theocratic city whose senile, Wasting God screams and babbles from His temple-palace, while His conniving priesthood rule with an iron fist.  To the east, beyond the crumbling walls of that dank, damp port, are the Mewling Moors, a plain of white ghostgrass whose only sapient denizens are the headless anthropophagi whose clannish wars regularly fill the Moors with its characteristic din – the horrid, keening wails of their weird and high-pitched battle-cries, ghastly shrieks that issue forth from the gaping mouths on their shrivelled bellies.  South is Erebh and the Great Rictus, a vast wound in the earth where shadowy and gigantic things stir; to the north, the Shadowglass Steppes and the Firesong Marches, territory of jinni and the roaming zerda tortoise-herders; to the west, the Bluebottle Archipelago with its seething mutant jungles and its intertwined snakefolk.[/ic]

[ic=Sylphids]The creations of alchemists in Erebh, some of the creatures known as sylphids have escaped servitude in the City of Abysm and have wandered north, finding sanctuary wherever they can.  They are shy beings with the vague appearance of semi-corporeal humanoid women, their bodies formed from condensed vapours, vaporized organic fluids, and certain arcane herbs gathered from the Mewling Moors (usually by apprentices willing to dare the ghostgrass, the anthropophagi, and the banks of deadly Rotmist).[/ic]

[Rose-of-Vellum]

I don't know if I actually ever made a proper post about all the different currencies.

Ah well, another black mark on my sanity. Perhaps a quick currency question: what do Skein crowns look like (material, insignias)?

I did scrounge up some of the files.  Here are some fragments.

Excellent!! All three are great.

Bloodwood Caskets: Are there local 'timbers' near Erebh, or must vintners rely on exports from Lophius and its surrounding swamps (as I'm not sure what effect the Rotmists have upon Bloodwood).  

Gloom Coast: Did you ever decide what to do with the western-most edge of Abysm? Namely, does it reach all the way to the sea, or abruptly stop? Do tropean mists conceal the truth? Perhaps the belched, fetid-moist miasma of the Rictus merges with the folorn sea-fog, creating a permanent mist that obscures sight (or alternatively provides psychotropic hallucinations), poisons the mind and body, or else is so caustic/dangerous that it sublimates creatures inside (turning their solid body straight into gas). Watching someone die by gradual sublimation would be grotesque (and in a CE deranged mindset, stunningly beautiful).
Also, where in relation to the other geographical regions do you see the Rancid Barrens, Wraithwastes, and Crimson Emptiness? I've been assuming the Crimson Emptiness is the parched, red-soiled, spice-expunged deserts that lie north of the Lip/Erebh. Due to the name, I assumed the Rancid Barrens are nearer to Marainein. No clue about the Wraithwastes' location or nature (or perhaps you planned to scrap them since I have only found 1 old reference to the region).

Slyphids: Ironically I just wrote a similar blurb. I'll chalk that up as a broken clock mirroring Big Ben. The only difference was that I was also going to suggest that some theorize that sylphids might be a form of vulnerae (and thus a distant kin to jinn), even as others posit that they are the creations of Erebh(ite?) alchemists known as Takwinites, while others claim that both origins hold some truth.  

[Steerpike]

Bloodwood Caskets: Are there local 'timbers' near Erebh, or must vintners rely on exports from Lophius and its surrounding swamps (as I'm not sure what effect the Rotmists have upon Bloodwood).  

I'd imagine mostly the latter (relying on the swamps), but there could be farms/groves of these things...

I think at one point I had some idea about what happens where Abysm reaches the sea but I kind of forget.  It's probably the kind of thing people debate furiously in-setting.

As for geographical specifics... I never really mapped those areas, but yeah the Emptiness is north of Erebh and the Barrens are east of Marainein.  The Wraithwastes, I think, were going to be a region near to the Mewling Moors, where some kind of ancient eldritch catastrophe/weapon/radiation had affected the Aether so that anyone who dies returns as an angry spirit.  Basically I'd imagine they're part of the southeast Slaughterlands.

[Rose-of-Vellum]

Speaking of wraiths, are there spectre-like entities in CE? Namely, incorporeal beings that retain all or most of their memories/minds (even if distorted by death), and remain unable to pass-on? Geists and haunts seem to lack those qualities, notably the middle aspect.