Tonight!
Tonight we set about our Journey to the Fabulous Unknown City!
When they arrive they'll be confronted with the strange new place which is... still largely undocumented by me. The plan here is that I am creating a series of randomized cards, and once they leave one area they'll go through some confusing trouble and arrive in another - each is a map like the one above, randomly populated and created on-the-fly. It's going to be a pretty special amount of improvising on my part but I think I'm ready.
I should really come up with their opening scene though. They come out of the cable-car in the mists, they find themselves in a strange, broad plaza, the cables of the cars overhead spiderwebbing around a great pylon. The cars open, the guards toss out several crates, hurriedly, militarily, then, they start tossing out the captives/prisoners/pilgrims/adventurers. And then the cars go back, into the mist, down and away, down and away. The players have only moments to look through the crates before the hexagon-plaza comes alive! Bandits and madmen converge on the scene in a rush. Ape-like men with huge arms brachiate along the cables, they carry great mallets with heads in the shape of bronze fists in their feet. Masked men and women, dressed in ragged tatters and others still, stranger still, all emerge on the great, cracked glass hexagon and all do battle over the crates - they are terrifying and their calls and howls shake everyone to the bone.
From here I hope they can scatter to the empty buildings and look for or find things & people in the strange ruins. I'm going to come ready with some descriptive turns of phrase to set the tone...
Dirty street with dust & trash windblown to one side, drifting up against doors & walls
- Bricks from the road pulled up & repurposed for some unwholesome alter - still standing - but abandoned and stained with gore
- A street of leaning buildings, stories high, braced at the peak by a squashed cable-car that looms overhead
- A street of many shrines, elaborate and simple alike all with untouched cult statues of unknown monstrous gods. The incense and candles tell that some still pray here
- A carpeted street, rugs lying in layers - feet thick over cobbles - mouldering & lovely with some unseemly & damp writhing below
- A street full of hanged bones, decayed and eaten by birds, the remnants of ten thousands of ancient executions or suicides
- A viaduct looming over a road covered in crawling, climbing things - legions of ants & armadas of roaches, spiders, crabs and every other scuttling thing, the noise is incredible
- A street full of broken minarets and lined on the sides with stacked bells of every imaginable size, broken from their mounts & precariously positioned
- Streets covered in broken blades & axeheads a sound of metal striking metal over and over emanates from somewhere deep below
- Structures pierced by great fruiting trees, giants of their species, the sky is cielinged by a long procession of every-type of bird. They are uncannily silent
- Seats, chairs, pews and sofas are arrayed out in the street, as if a great performance was given, long-long ago on the roof of the building at the end of the lane.
- A gushing fountain gives a horrible, poisonous smell, what pours from its many spouts is white and caustic. There are many bodies
- A series of animate statues that bow & move & genuflect - their mouths working mutely. From elsewhere there is a long stream of sound - some barking, doglike language
- The roads are ripped up & the underworks are exposed below - layers of huge tunnels, pipes & whole encampments in successive layers
- A series of signs is marked throughout - they each lead from one location to another in a series of halfhearted riddles - at the end of the puzzle there is a dead man, the body has been used as a toilet
- The doors & windows are all just cracked & fading facades - painted over disconcerting steel structures - steel cables & platonic shapes all solid and rusting
- A series of collapsed bridges & viaducts have squashed the buildings, they are functional ramps- easy to climb as they are overrun by thick green vines
- Several pendulums swing from a spiderweb of cables overhead, some are huge, some small, fist sized - they gyrate endlessly & never seem to touch
- A gigantic bonfire unlit. It stands many dozens of feet high, looming terribly, shaky & unsteady
- Beads of glass - some burned, many colorful. They cling to all surfaces as if sprayed out or exploded. There is almost a pattern to be found in there.
- The persistent smell of woodfires but no smoke, no ash, no charred remnants. The long palm fronds scuttle across the ground dried and fallen.
Still - I think I need something pleasing for them to have or get, some handy place to hide and find a way to 'safety'.
