The Cadaverous Earth

[Nomadic]

Quick question, what exactly is in the haunted quarter. Is there anything actually living there, or is it a true ghost town?

[Steerpike]

[ooc]From the main Moroi post on the first page, the "haunted quarter," known as The Boil:

The Boil

Unlike the ossified Elder Tree of Suckle-town, the charnel corpse that towers with blackened limbs over the ruinous Arbour dubbed The Boil was not merely drained dry. In the distant past some disaster caused the Tree to ignite, the nectar within boiling beneath the bark, splitting the Tree's flesh and spilling out into the streets in steaming gouts of eldritch vapour and seething golden liquid. This catastrophe, known as the Conflagration or the Boiling, laid waste to the part of Moroi now called The Boil. Fire swept the streets, burning homes and citizens; yet even after the eldritch flames had died and the last embers faded, The Boil remained a shunned, forbidden place. Strange creatures stirred in the cinders '" perhaps the former residents, perhaps things invoked through the chaotic arcane tempest of the Conflagration itself. Those who ventured into the charred wreckage in hope of looting the ruins returned with stories of shifting streets, watching eyes, and unspeakable terrors lurking in the ashes '" if they returned at all. It was as if the district itself assumed a kind of sentience, becoming a faceless but malevolent presence with vengeful appetites.

Today the Boil is walled off with stern battlements of brick and iron heavily warded to contain whatever entities, curses, or creatures were spawned in the fires. Only a handful of scavengers, universally deemed insane, dare enter The Boil, and most fall victim to whatever dwells within.

Blistermaze

The oozing walls of Blistermaze are afflicted with a roving pestilence, an architectural leprosy: patches of peeling plaster or crumbling brick will suddenly develop weeping sores and pustules that eventually worsen into membranous cysts. The cysts swell and grow, incubating the hideous denizens of Blistermaze: scuttling, quadruped beasts somewhere between degenerate humans, hairless dogs, and spiders, hunchbacked, mandibled, flesh-hungry creatures with tremendous agility and poisonous bites, the pox-dogs of Blistermaze. After having birthed a brood of these chittering monstrosities the cysts and pustules will rapidly close, scab, and heal, leaving only shredded castings and scars.

Manglespur

A tribe of humanoid things resembling naked, emaciated men and women from the neck down infest Manglespur; their heads are cut off halfway up their faces, just before their eyes, giving way to an incongruous and squirming array of tightly clustered insect limbs. Their appearance is often preceded by a roving mist, tainted slaughterhouse red and reeking of burnt flesh; this unearthly fog cloaks their arrival, allowing them to draw close to their prey on silent, spindly limbs. Doors have become gnashing mouths and the black sockets of windows are filled with watching eyes in the claustrophobic alleys of Manglespur. Here the Grasping Darkness oozes from building to building, a crawling death; here the bricks or flagstones can become cackling faces with cruel, biting teeth. Huge flapping things somewhere between birds and bats with rotting bodies and protruding bones nest in the attics and atop the roofs, fluttering their leathery feathers and cawing hideously.

Blackenburgh

The physical center of The Boil, Blackenburgh is a scorched, desolate ruin whose buildings are little more than burnt-out shells. The incinerated remains of the Elder Tree tower above the ruins, branches twisted, trunk warped, bark scalded. Ashes still rain upon Blackenburgh, stirred up by whispering winds that echo with the screams of the burning citizenry. A few globs of solidified metal melted during the Conflagration litter the ground, once parts of the machine that drained the Tree and whose possible malfunction is theorized to have precipitated the Boiling itself. Ashen wraiths speculated to be some form of soot elemental have congealed out of the destruction of Blackenburgh, ghostly manifestations of the Conflagration that are dispersed only with difficulty.[/ooc]

[Nomadic]

Ah ok, I think the last time I read that you only had a small bit on it. Very curious. Most certainly a place most people wouldn't want to go.

[LordVreeg]

So is the whole boil within Moroi, or some of it?  How deep into the city?  Where there sewers under it that now lead out...and in?

How long ago did this happen?

Poisonous Pox-dogs of Blistermaze?  What a great wrench to add to the Necromancy Lexicon...consider that stolen.

[Steerpike]

[ooc][blockquote=Lord Vreeg]So is the whole boil within Moroi, or some of it? How deep into the city? Where there sewers under it that now lead out...and in?

How long ago did this happen?[/blockquote]

The Boil is entirely within Moroi and takes up a little less than a third of the city.  It has been entirely walled off and warded to contain the horrors within.  The sewers have been bricked up when they enter the area below the Boil, though there might be forgotten entrances somewhere in the depths below the city.

I'm thinking the Conflagration/Boil happened a considerable time ago, but considerably less than some of the other disasters that have wracked the setting - perhaps a few hundred years rather than Aeons.  Time is kind of almost intentionally vague in this setting, although I may eventually work out a detailed timeline... part of the idea is that time and history kind of run together after long enough, as the world "moves on" as in The Dark Tower series.[/ooc]

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Gigantic update just posted near the bottom of the first page: the adventure outlines for Lophius.  I wanted to add it to the Lophius post, but it was too big to fit - it's over 9000 words, heh.  It's definitely a wall o' text, but hopefully an interesting one, and there are 4 separate arcs that can be read independently, though there are some connections between them.  This set of adventures owes more to Indiana Jones, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Lovecraft then to  Perdido Street Station or From Hell... any and all feedback is very appreciated, and I'm quite willing to swap reviews if desired.

Here are some images I had in mind while writing:
[spoiler=Images of Lophius and the Swamps]
 
 
 [/spoiler]  [/ooc]

[Llum]

The new set of adventures was really good. Not as interconnected as the previous set, but good none-the-less, and I believe they each have a chance to chain to another adventure, so no problems there.

The last adventure with the deep-dwellers, screams Lovecraft to me, very cool. The crustacean people are great as well. I did have a question, how exactly can a barnacle be aggressive?

The first and third adventures are well done, I like how they easily incorporate possibilities for ship-to-ship battles. However the first adventure seemed like it could be potentially near-impossible. How long could a group of adventurers wade through hundreds of pirates?

Once again your descriptions are fantastic. The various ship captains and their crews were very intriguing. Not much I can say about the second adventure, I can see it being a bit tedious tracking down the imp to four separate places, getting the adventurers in the mood for a snatch-and-grab at the temple. The reward seems to be the best as well, a connection to the nobles in Skein would be quite good.

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Good points.  With the barnacles I was thinking nasty long tongues that actively seek out prey - I should probably clairfy that.

The "hundreds of pirates" thing is a problem, yes, and that's why stealth is the best bet, or recruiting the rest of the crew for the assault.  An ideal attack would be enacted when most of the clan is away.  Remember also that the pirates are scattered throughout a large cavern complex and are not all expecting battle.  Alarms aren't extensive either in the complex, so its quite possible that through a modicum of stealth the players could clear out a room at a time while evading larger groups.

The second might suffer from some tedium; it's the least action-oriented, certainly, but investigatory adventures are some groups' cup of tea, and the whole thing is designed primarily to acquaint the players well with the city.  I think a few encounters thrown in with some cutthroats or pickpockets would liven things up, at the GM's discretion.

Edit: clarified some things and added a couple of changes... thanks so much Llum for wading through the adventures, and so quickly![/ooc]

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Added a vignette to Baranauskas, which was missing one.  It's a bit superficial perhaps, but that's what I get for watching Quantam of Solace and old episodes of Trigun over the same few days...[/ooc]

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=NAVIGATEGAR]Eidolons

Consumed by satyriasis, the insatiable incubi known as eidolons are a cambion race, an all-male breed of grave-spawn with the ability to drain youth and vitality in order to rejuvenate their physical bodies. Narcissistic in the extreme, eidolons are tall, exquisitely handsome men with bloodless, alabaster complexions, green eyes, and shimmering black hair (frequently worn very long) that becomes grey and eventually white if the eidolon fails to feed. Sunlight does not destroy them but it does strip them of their glamer, revealing their true bodies '" twisted, malformed old men bloated with tumorous growths '" and dispelling the aura of hypersexuality they usually emanate.

One of the few grave-spawn races regarded with near universal loathing, eidolons lead clandestine un-lives, blending in with the quick, often in the upper levels of mortal hierarchy. Having infiltrated human society eidolons begin to feed on young men and women in order to sustain themselves. Most are hundreds of years old, their true manifestations resembling walking corpses. To forestall deterioration eidolons seduce beautiful youths and feed off their desire, beauty, and vitality through copulation. In doing so, eidolons physically age their victims several years while restoring their own youth in the process. Insufferably vain, eidolons find fresh prey frequently, lest their own beauty begin to ebb; eidolons who '" perish the thought '" discover silver hairs in their usually immaculate black manes immediately seek out a new victim, often coupling with the unfortunate individual until they are little more than a desiccated husk. While rape can suffice to regenerate an eidolon's glamer, they consider the act vulgar and unsophisticated in the extreme.

Eidolons are aesthetes with a great appreciation for beauty. Sadistic, self-serving sociopaths without conscience, they are adept at feigning passionate love for their prey and are usually highly accomplished poets, artists, or musicians, as well as being superb conversationalists and beings with exceptional taste for the finer things in life. Eidolons reproduce by impregnating human women, siring male stillborn children who frequently kill their mothers during birth, then revivify as newly spawned eidolons.[/blockquote]

what type of frequency here?  I get the feeling of rareness but with a reproduction mechanic that seems like there should be a fair number?  
I find these tremendous...I do have something I call 'social Vampyres', UNDEAD that hang out in cities pretending to still be peope...

By your definition, I spent years being an Eidolon...

[Steerpike]

[ooc][blockquote=Vreeg]what type of frequency here? I get the feeling of rareness but with a reproduction mechanic that seems like there should be a fair number?[/blockquote]
I was thinking fairly rare, though good point about their reproductive capabilities.  If perhaps 1 in 10 people on the Cadaverous Earth are undead (probably around right, maybe even a bit conservative) then perhaps somewhere in the region of 1 in 100 might be an eidolon (the majority being made up of zombies and ghilan).  They tend to be attracted to wealthier circles and so are most concentrated in cities like Skein and Crepuscle, which have very elite upper crusts (they can't masquerade as Lords Revenant because they wouldn't be able to connect to the hive-mind shared by the Lords' zehrer).  Roughly though that would mean in any random sampling of a thousand people there'd be an eidolon somewhere.

I wanted to make them feel both like traditional incubi and like vampires of the Bram Stoker/Lestat persuasion - elegant, sophisticated, and predatory.  The whole de-aging thing was inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray and a mesoamerican mummy on Buffy who killed people to restore her youth; the sunlight-shows-them-as-they-really-are thing is a pretty blatant Pirates of the Caribbean ripoff.  Glad you liked them, I think they're a relatively unusual sort of "monster"; the short story at the opening of Skein is meant to showcase how one of them might operate (as well as to capture the decadent masquerade feel I want for the upper crust of the Clockwork City). [/ooc]

[LordVreeg]

[ooc][blockquote=Vreeg]what type of frequency here? I get the feeling of rareness but with a reproduction mechanic that seems like there should be a fair number?[/blockquote]
I was thinking fairly rare, though good point about their reproductive capabilities.  If perhaps 1 in 10 people on the Cadaverous Earth are undead (probably around right, maybe even a bit conservative) then perhaps somewhere in the region of 1 in 100 might be an eidolon (the majority being made up of zombies and ghilan).  They tend to be attracted to wealthier circles and so are most concentrated in cities like Skein and Crepuscle, which have very elite upper crusts (they can't masquerade as Lords Revenant because they wouldn't be able to connect to the hive-mind shared by the Lords' zehrer).  Roughly though that would mean in any random sampling of a thousand people there'd be an eidolon somewhere.

I wanted to make them feel both like traditional incubi and like vampires of the Bram Stoker/Lestat persuasion - elegant, sophisticated, and predatory.  The whole de-aging thing was inspired by The Picture of Dorian Gray and a mesoamerican mummy on Buffy who killed people to restore her youth; the sunlight-shows-them-as-they-really-are thing is a pretty blatant Pirates of the Caribbean ripoff.  Glad you liked them, I think they're a relatively unusual sort of "monster"; the short story at the opening of Skein is meant to showcase how one of them might operate (as well as to capture the decadent masquerade feel I want for the upper crust of the Clockwork City). [/ooc]

Oh, with more undead infiltrating Igbar, this convinced me to create a Uncompyre out of one of the PC's decadent friends.  PC's are so wrapped up in themselves that someone they know changing sides will take eons to occur to them...

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Added an entry for geists in the grave-spawn post - a more monstrous form of undead, embodiments of mindless infection.  They are in some ways similar to the fetch, though perhaps a little more eerie.

I'm working on a map for the setting, albeit a roughly sketched one.

Love the sound of the Uncompyre, Vreeg.  That isn't the same guy that was once an investigator/adventurer in Igbar that you showed me, is it?  The one with the hobbyt associate?  I seem to recall him getting vamped...[/ooc]

[Llum]

You mention oneiroi not being affected by geists but humanoids are. yet most of the oneiroi mentioned are vaguely humanoid. I'm sure you meant only the quick and ghilan but its a little strange.

The fettergeist are probably my favorite, really cool. The sorrowgeist war pretty neat as well.

Now you say the geists are extremely infectious, I was wondering why a almost Dawn of the Dead style super infection doesn't just explode and obliterate a city? The only theory I came up with was the large % of non-humanoids that are immune.

The geists also seem like a very good weapon to be used, maybe by the cestoids seeking to reclaim their empire or something. Fantastic stuff as usual.

[LordVreeg]

[blockquote=Steepike]Love the sound of the Uncompyre, Vreeg. That isn't the same guy that was once an investigator/adventurer in Igbar that you showed me, is it? The one with the hobbyt associate? I seem to recall him getting vamped...[/blockquote]

Well, he's already and Uncompyre.  But the PC's havwe a few high-falutin friends in the 'Grounds of Dismissal', and some of them are especially decadent.  Members of the Istar of Igbar, the old families.  Players so often think of themselves as the only thing that changes in a game, so they rarely think that something can happen to part of the 'backdrop'.  I will bge using your eidolon as a template, as being an Uncompyre will increase those tendencies.