Barony Visual References

I wanted to put together a repository some of the visual referencing I've been using in my blog posts, collected over the last few months, so that it's all in one place.

GENERAL FASHION/MATERIAL CULTURE/COOKING MACHINE REFERENCES

Typical Baronial jewellery rig.

Soldier of the White City, with standard issue steel face mask. 

Soldier of the White City in their mass-produced steel armour. 

Baronial youth. 

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine (I sometimes draw these on receipt roll at work). 

Cooking Machine.

Cooking Machine (on aluminium).

Typical Baronial choker jewellery + harness. At this size usually cut glass. 

White City military and civilian harnessing.

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes. 

More White City citizen silhouettes (too much ball cap in this one). 

More Baronial silhouettes. 

More Baronial silhouettes (half-cape and anchoring brooches). 

More Baronial silhouettes (half-cape and anchoring brooches). 

More Baronial silhouettes (typical jacket cut and brooch detailing). 

CLASSES AND MONSTERS

Bravo with death's head mask and cross knife. 

Rapier duelist.

Law Eater.

Chaos Eater.

Saber duelist.

Bravo (harlequin half-cape, cross knife, no mask).

Ogre-ish young man.

A Beholder for your Setting - Lantern Heads

An elegant monster for a more civilised age.

This is something like a formal exercise, inspired by Arnold K's Terophidian and some chat with Semiurge on Phlox's server.

The Beholder is a (maybe the?) dnd bestiary mainstay; iconic, recognisable, deadly, with pleasingly baroque rules and a bizarre-but-coherent personality. In terms of monster design, the Beholder is obviously something to aspire to. 

A tall order obviously, but also a fun thing to take on!

Lantern Head

Lantern Heads are strange beings, not native to the Barony. They are occasionally imported as curiosities, but their origins are obscure. 

The essence of a Lantern Head is (of course) its 'lantern', which looks like a tiny pinpoint of bright white light, suspended at the centre of a tough transparent sphere. The sphere is actually a biological skin, filled with absolutely clear fluid, and capable of moving itself around (slowly) by undulating and rolling like an ungainly plastic bag full of water. The light at the centre shines outwards, and is exactly analogous to the thing's sensory apprehension. If the light from the lantern falls on you, the Lantern Head can perceive you - if the light doesn't fall on you, it can't. Lantern heads can't touch, smell, taste, or hear - their entire capacity for perception is visual (and psychic, read below). 

Any dead thing (with a more or less intact nervous system) that falls under the light of the lantern is animated by the Lantern Head's will. This is not at all like an angel's resurrection - the bodies have no motive power or will of their own, and collapse immediately if they pass out of the light. Lantern heads often have animated corpses carry them around (the classical image is of a dead body holding the lantern high above its head, the better to shine down on everything around it), and have been known to get creative with stitching corpses together into more interesting or useful forms. They will also hoard the corpses of humans and animals to protect themselves if they feel under threat.

The nervous system thing is important - a Lantern Head can make an arm flop around, or a severed head snap, but won't be able to animate a skeleton. It has no way of preserving its bodies, and as they decompose they become less and less useful as thralls. 

Lantern Heads are also capable of reproducing - but only asexually - by 'infecting' light sources. Any light source that falls under the light of the Lantern Head will, over the course of five minutes, become infected this way - once the process is complete it will begin giving off the same strange white light. The Lantern Head can 'see' and animate corpses from this new source - it is in every way a physical extension of the original Lantern Head. 

Lantern Heads know their own light, and seek to destroy the light of other Lantern Heads, which they perceive as threats. The light of older Lantern Heads is 'stronger', and will 'colonise' other sources of light preferentially to that of younger creatures.

If a living being is caught in the light of the Lantern Head, they will hear music like chimes in their head, and their organs will begin cooking inside them. If this is you, you take 1 psychic damage the first turn, 2 the next turn, 4 the next turn, etc. You are also incapable of speaking while in the light - when you try, you make a sound like chimes. Lantern Heads are perfectly capable of reproducing in your torches or lanterns. 

A Lantern Head dies immediately if it is ever exposed to sunlight - likewise, any Lantern Head light or light source is immediately 'killed' by sunlight, and loses its special properties. 

A Lantern Head left to its own devices will attempt to amass lenses, mirrors, and powerful lanterns. It has a poor understanding of human society, so it will usually not be very good at this. A Lantern Head that is nicely ensconced underground will generally send up parties of thralls at night, carrying infected torches, to search for optical machinery.

Of special interest are focusing lenses, coloured glass, and powerful lanterns - lighthouses in particular. The dead thralls bring them down underground and store them, or use them to build elaborate light machines at the design of the Lantern Head. Mirrors, glass walls, focusing lenses, flaring torches, chemical lanterns: any Lantern Head warren of any size will be filled with these contraptions, that the Lantern Head seems to take enormous pleasure shining itself through them. 

In addition to the usual effects of exposure, the light of a Lantern Head is modified in the following ways, when shone through coloured mediums:

• Red Light: test CHAR or spend your turn attacking the nearest living thing. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Blue Light: test CHAR or self-mutilate for [weapon you are carrying] damage. This is not an attack, don't roll to hit. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Green Light: test CHAR or take a permanent -1 to CHAR. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Yellow Light: as Red and Green (only test CHAR once, but apply both effects). 
• Cyan Light: as Blue and Green (only test CHAR once, but apply both effects). 
• Magenta Light: as Red and Blue (only test CHAR once, but apply both effects).  

In addition to these earthly colours, a Lantern Head will search for rare uncolour-tinted mediums through which to shine itself:

• Ulfire: test CHAR or suddenly understand the chime-language of the Lantern Head. It will tell you of its plan (see below) - how you react is up to you. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 
• Jale: test CHAR or become infected with a newborn Lantern Head. Lose 1 CON each day - when you die, the baby Lantern Head will hatch inside your heart. Surgery might save you, if you know someone capable of such things. -1 on the save for each consecutive turn of exposure. 

If you extinguish all sources of a Lantern Head's light, it dies. The originary lantern has 1 hp, is unarmoured, and is extinguished when killed. 

The Plan of the Lantern Heads

The only long term goal of a Lantern Head is to somehow build a projector powerful enough to shoot itself out into the vastness of the black infinity beyond the night sky, and (finally, after so many millennia) rejoin the others like it. 

Dungeon Depth

Barony uses some bespoke morale rules, currently written up as follows:

PC Morale

• Separate from hireling and enemy morale, which should be rolled as normal.

• In the Dungeon, you gain 1 fear every time a hit does 3 or more HP damage. In the Underground, this goes up to d2. In Chaos, d3. If you are crit, these numbers are 2, d2+2, d3+3 instead. There are also specific monsters and attacks that will deal fear damage, as detailed in their stat blocks.

• If your fear damage ever equals your WIS, you must save WIS or CHAR, with a penalty equal to any fear damage over your WIS. If you fail, your morale breaks and you run, or drop your weapons, or scream, or cower. At minimum you lose your turn and then heal d6 fear.

• If this brings you back under your WIS you can act again as normal on your next turn. If it doesn’t, the same thing happens next turn, until your fear is brought below your WIS.

• If you decide to save WIS and you pass, you heal d6 fear damage without your morale breaking. You can consume a dose of sedatives to roll this save with advantage. In a fight you are swallowing it instead of smoking it - a free action, and unpleasant, but effective. 

• If you decide to save CHAR and you pass, you don't heal the fear damage but you no longer need to check fear (and no longer take fear damage) for [CHAR-10] rounds. You can consume a dose of stimulants to roll this save with advantage. In a fight you are swallowing it instead of smoking it - a free action, and unpleasant, but effective. 

• Resting for lunch heals d6 fear. Getting a good night's sleep heals 2d6.

• There are no systemic permanent insanities— that's what curses (and specific stuff on the monster’s stat block) are for.

I like PCs panicking and dithering, and I like the oppressive dread of the dungeon growing into a kind of madness. In my mind, PC adventurers are rough people, hardened and tempered, difficult to shake. But the wrongness at the centre of the earth gets to everyone. On the surface you are in command of your faculties, but the further in you go the more your mind starts to crack under the strain. 

The rules above refer to The Dungeon, The Underworld, and Chaos, as three separate layers with increasingly serious effects on PC morale. Hirelings and most normal people would flatly refuse to enter the Underworld, let alone Chaos. This nice, formal breakdown comes from the three separate layers of the dungeon I'm slowly writing up for the Barony release, Magda's Needle (scroll to the end of this post). I realised this morning that the system can easily be made more generalist and broadly useable. 

Instead of three apparently diegetic layers of horror, each dungeon layer has a an abstract depth associated with it. I would probably keep these between 1 (for most dungeons close to the surface) and 5 (for the churning chaos at the centre/hell/the nightmare plane/the endless oubliette/whatever your worst place is). This is an abstract measure of wrongness and terror, not an actual measuring of the physical depth from the surface, although the two very often go hand in hand. 

I feel like I've buried the lead a little here. Fear damage is simply 1d[depth] for a hit over 2, and 1d[depth]+[depth] for a crit.

An adventurer will always feel it when they have descended down a depth level. It's something like your skin crawling, a premonition of physical vulnerability, and bad depression hitting you at the same time, and it gets really bad the further you push in. They all have names for it, and will usually joke about it together in an attempt to dispel its power. Seasoned adventurers know well the value of song, humour, trust, and kindness in the dark places of the earth. 

As Above So Below (actually a pretty good film for the first two thirds)

Drug Satchels

Every human PC in Barony has a drug pouch in addition to whatever else they are carrying - you start with one, and if you lose it you can get it replaced cheaply. This is an entirely separate inventory that you get for free on top of your usual slots, and it contains smoking paraphernalia (in the Barony this is almost always a pipe of some kind) and doses of drugs.

You can choose to have a waterproof drug pouch, which has room for 5 doses in addition to the pipe, or a non-proofed one that has room for 10 doses. Additional doses must be carried in your inventory as normal, with 10 amounting to a single inventory slot. 

You don't get a drug pouch if you are a White Ape, Dog, Cat, or Terror Bird, although you can have one custom-made. Even if you do get one made, you can't smoke a pipe without hands.

Drugs with adventuring uses (repeated from an earlier post, included here for ease of reference):

• Stimulants. Can be consumed to roll with advantage on a CHAR check to ignore the effects of panic. Also used for various class features.  
• Sedatives. Can be consumed to roll with advantage on a WIS check to mitigate the effects of panic. Also used for various class features.  
• Prophylactics. Prevents infection by disease for one hour. 
• Curatives. Curatives give you a high fever, but will improve your condition one step up the disease track each day until you are cured. You will be semi-conscious for the duration. Every disease has a point after which Curatives become less effective. 
• Painkillers. You may ignore the effects of pain for one hour. This does not grant you HP, but might help you walk on a broken leg, for example. 

Drugs with fluffier social uses, and exotic stuff from the White City, can be found here. 

Hatesteel Blades

I have been informed that my last post put me in debt to Joesky, so have another, ya filthy animals.

Hatesteel Blades 

(thank you Josie for the name)

Infamously razor sharp, brittle, expensive, and difficult to use. A blade for a bored aristocrat, or for someone who makes their entire living using sharp swords well. 'Hatesteel' comes from the fact that most normal people fucking hate the person carrying one. 

A Hatesteel Blade looks like a giant utility/Stanley knife, with a very long handle. It is a +1 weapon, and can be manipulated by the wielder to serve different combat roles. It starts with 5 charges, referred to below as 'blades'.

At the cost of an action, you may choose to extend or retract your Hatesteel Blade to any length between 3 and 1. 3 blades of length is equivalent to a slashing heavy sword +1, 2 is a slashing medium sword +1, 1 is a slashing light sword +1. Your fumble range increases by the number of blades you have extended, and if you fumble, you break off one of the blades, and reduce your remaining total by one. This also shortens the weapon you are holding by one step, medium > light etc.

If you crit while it's a medium weapon, you roll 3 damage dice instead of 2. If you crit while it's a heavy weapon, you lop off a random limb (which takes most things out of the fight):

1. random hand
2. random arm at the elbow
3. random arm at the shoulder
4. random leg below the knee
5. random leg at the thigh
6. head

A wielder with fighter levels may choose to attempt to snap a blade off inside their target. Make an attack at -2, and if the attack hits, spend one of your charges and reduce the length of your blade by one. The target will take d6 damage each turn that they move or attack, which lasts until they spend a full turn doing nothing but pulling the fucking thing out of themselves (which will trigger the damage).  

Once you break your last blade, the weapon becomes useless.

You can buy refills (5 more charges) from specialist merchants - these aren't quite as ruinously expensive as the blade itself, but they aren't far off. 

Expect fighters of mettle to comment on your lack of it. 

I am Asuka Langley

Tonal Specificity

NOT CONTENT a collection of thoughts following a discussion around tone and procedures of play, with The Bad Doctor (of the truly excellent Was it Likely blog) on Discord.

Clarice Lispector

Thoughts about Tone

• Proposition: all swords cuts are the same. It doesn't matter what you're cutting - this is obviously not how people live. Rejoinder: yes, all sword cuts are the same. You hit your father with a sword, you roll d6, you hit a nameless goblin with a sword, you roll a d6. The difference between these two acts escapes the simulationist space. 
• The Critical Role answer to this is capital R Roleplay about the angst you feel about your dead father; the simulationist answer to this might be: yes, all people die the same way, the pathos is elsewhere. 
• You could play a game where killing your father was a bespoke act with various tests and rolls associated with it - you could try to model the specific, terrible difficulty of killing your father. The DM could make a series of rulings for this on the spot, or you could make rules around emotional turmoil/uncertainty/trauma etc., and apply them as you thought necessary. What a simulationsist space does is introduce something like radical agency/the possibility for frictionless decision making/limited sociopathy into all character decisions. You are responsible for the decision to swing the sword, not the difficulty in killing your father. You might have the additional responsibility of larping being sad (if you're a CR type of person), but this is a totally separate thing.
• There is a weird double thing going on here: do CRPGs want to believe that they encourage players to get into their characters to the extent that killing your fictional father is a more difficult thing to do than killing a nameless goblin? I think this isn't actually true, and what they do instead is set up a perfect order where things can easily be reduced to known quantities. This isn't the same as the assertion that the characters are necessarily sociopathic - that all OSR characters are professional operators who don't worry about these things. I think it's something closer to the literary refusal of interiority.
• You give dignity to the intensity of emotional trauma/specificity by NOT attempting to describe it. You see this all the time in classical literature, and a lots less past the 20th century, when a lot of writing became obsessed with making itself adequate to the emotional specificity of interiority - the mind mirroring itself, lots of formal strategies for this. In classical literature it's very common for the description of the pain to be simple - 'she struck her father down and she wept,' or 'she didn't eat for four days.' No FORMAL attention to the intensity of feeling. This, I suspect, is because the writer is making some claim about the impossibility of really representing this pain, and allowing the space for the reader to do this work themselves. 
• There is something similar in providing minimal possible structuring framework for highly dramatic activities - even killing goblins in a cave is highly dramatic. Killing your father is a different thing. The wager of the OSR/simulationist system is that you are better at providing genuine pathos than it is (I think).
• Minimalist and stripped gestures have this reticence/space for dignified self-direction coded into them at an aesthetic level - a general rule, and possibly not supportable, but I'm thinking about the perverse thing that happens where the more a given work tries to up the emotional pathos, the harder it is for the emotion to feel earned. 

Shirley Jackson

Digression on Dark Souls

• Dark Souls does this almost all the way through. There is minimal music. The weapons and armour you find are mostly utterly workmanlike, but even more than this your character moves in a completely stripped back way. Most of the time, an attack is a quick, single action - something that feels of a piece with the decision to press the button, but also something that looks roughly relatable, the way someone would conserve action if they were really swinging a sword around. There is, I think importantly, nothing particularly realistic about the combat rhythm in Dark Souls (dodge rolling, huge swords, etc etc), but the design and tone of the game are almost entirely anti-heroic.
• This gives the actual pathos and tragedy at the core of those games so much room to breathe. At no time is anyone telling you how to feel about anything - when they do they are lying to your face. You are given the courtesy of coming to the pathos in your own time, by your own means, and this makes it true and real for each player.
• Weirdly another game that I thought did this was WoW in the classic days, during the initial 0 - 60 run. I've never felt so comfortably, blissfully ignored by the world than I used to in low level WoW - bizarre, considering how that game's explicit goal was to make you feel like an epic high fantasy hero. I suspect some of it was getting in before the outrageous (and frankly stupid) power creep of the expansions, mixed in with the diegetic conceit that you were simply one powerful adventurer among many, and until level 50 or so weren't even that powerful. I have a crystal memory of hitting about level 35, and realising that I could now armour myself like a basic footman from the RTS games. Beautiful game, beautifully designed play experience. 

My boi Oscar

These murderous, ganking fucks

Some More Fashion Posting

A quick follow up to this post I did a few days ago, about the material cultures of the Barony and White City. 

In the White City, by far the most ubiquitous clothing for citizens is a plain, un-dyed and unornamented all-in-one jumpsuit or flight-suit. These suits are worn by all genders and ages, and can be bought everywhere, cheaply. They are baggy enough not to require much tailoring, and usually include cinches at the elbow, knees, wrist, ankles, waist, and neck, to ensure that the bagginess can be tied-away when the wearer needs to do physical work. This is the under-layer, or frame, for a citizen. 

The suits feature large open areas on the back and front of the chest, at the upper arm, and often on the thighs, where images can be worn. These are usually a second piece of fabric that is tied into place on top of the suit - suits will often have loops incorporated into them to facilitate this. Images are usually made by hand by the individual game player, although you can also pay artists to make images to your spec.

The White City citizenry also makes extensive use of half cloaks, which are tailored close to the body and without much material give, to keep the surface area relatively flat, which makes it more useful for game-playing. Also commonly seen: soft fabric caps, tied under the chin, with image-decoration across the forehead (a bit like a baseball cap); fabric webbing and harnessing worn over the top of the suit, for normal portage; large, bulky jackets in rare cold weather (the White City has mostly mediterranean weather), something like a bomber jacket. 

All citizens can be called up into the militia, in which they are responsible for the purchase and maintenance of their own armour while on campaign. There is a style of tough, layered and quilted fabric armour, with bands of steel woven into it, which is common with the citizens, and which usually comes as a chest piece, helmet, pauldrons, vambraces, and shin protection. Wealthy citizens can add to this basic harness, all the way up to expensive steel plate, but this is rare in the militias. 

Professional soldiers are issued their own arms and armour by the state, and this includes a flight-suit under-layer. The suit of the soldier is differentiated by the arming points sewn into it, which allow the wearing to be laced into a suit of steel plates (much like an arming jacket, but in a one piece garment) - they are otherwise mostly identical to the civilian version. The soldiers are also game players, and will paint their suits and armour accordingly. 

Citizen Angels and Citizen Demons paint their iron puppet bodies the same way.

The Courtesans are the only group in the White City who are formally forbidden from playing the Image Game.

Rough silhouettes from the White City citizenry

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In the Barony, tailored clothing is a status symbol, and the rich show their wealth with elaborately planned and lavishly ornamented garments. Outfits are designed to spec, for ceremony, working, familiar, political, religious, and may other specific situations. There is a fascination with fabric that has been worked into, either with precious metals and stone, or with decorative finishes (the fabric roses, pictured below, are a common motif). 

In the Barony, if you want to be taken seriously as a professional, you want to look both androgynous and wealthy. If you are not wearing jewellery, you will be assumed not to own any. If you are not wearing makeup, it will be assumed that you can't afford it.

For people enmeshed in the Baronial Capital's many cultural scenes (the Bravo Gangs, Academies, Artists, Poets, the Actors), these rules have some give and take, and flouting them can garner you countercultural prestige. In the courts of the petty nobility, this is much harder. You will not be received into the court of a Petty Queen without the proper attire and cosmetics. If they are particularly proud, conservative, or in a bad mood, you might not be received if you do't put some effort into dressing the way that they specifically like (most courts have cuts, jewels, fragrances, and makeup patterns associated with them, and one of the cherished practices of the old nobility is instituting their own favourites as new sovereigns are crowned).

Baronial clothing: tailored, embellished, tough wearing, formal, signifying. 

Baronial makeup: pinks, reds, whites, blacks. Heavy emphasis on androgyny (beards are often plucked), and on youth and health. Countercultural makeup often resembles corpses or skulls, and is considered irreligious. Eyes, cheeks, and lips are the focus. 

Baronial jewellery: pearls and diamonds are the basic, ubiquitous favourites of everyone. Clear cut glass is often used to frame and augment true diamonds, even by the wealthy, which means that you can see some impossibly dripped-out pieces (we would consider them costume jewellery, but in the Barony they will often incorporate one or two real stones where the eye would most likely settle). Necklaces (especially chokers), earrings, wrist and ankle bracelets, brooches, and jewelled chest harnesses are the most usual forms. Gold and silver are used, but so is tin, copper, brass, iron, and lead. Famous poets spend serious time and thought on the qualities of these metals and stones under the light, and on what they do to the body so adorned. 

Baronial with jacket featuring fabric roses.

The Optical Dungeon/The Process Dungeon

I have a fascination with the linguistic description of works of art (ekphrastic writing), and architectural spaces - actually one of the early signs that my brain might process things a little differently than most people was almost universal feedback from editors and test-readers that I should tone down the descriptions of architecture (of course I shall do no such thing, a pervert must remain so).

My favourite parts of Umberto Eco's fantastic novel The Name of the Rose were a description of a church door, and the slowly-unfolding architectural specificities of a building called the Aedificium - a scriptorium, library, labyrinth, and abstracted cartographic miniature. 

This as lightly torturous introduction to the real point of this post, which is that there are two dungeons that I have been writing around and towards for a long time, and which I one day hope the realise by properly committing them to paper: the optical dungeon, and the process dungeon. The write up of Magda's Needle has elements of both, but they continue to elude me in their pure state, so I thought that I would get down some thoughts as a guide to myself, and also maybe as a thorn at my side, to spur me towards their inclusion with the completed first version of Barony.

-

The Optical Dungeon

The optical dungeon is an architectural volume that is at least partially defined and contingent on the operations of light: projection, diffusion, focusing, reflection, refraction. It also functions with reference to different colours and specificities of light, and to the projection of images-as-light.

An important component of the optical dungeon is the use and misuse of various portable machines that variously generate and manipulate light. Their uses should be broadly intuitive, even if their mechanical function is abstracted (even abstracted to the point of 'it's just magic, don't worry about it, although I would like to avoid this'). Projectors, directional and point lighting, mirrors, lenses - also frames and screens, since the framing of light (especially of a projected image) is an important part of its function. A logistical sub-system of powering and otherwise manipulating these machines.

And then the architecture of the dungeon, fixed and immobile (without player chicanery ofc). Walls and architectural surfaces and features that are themselves mirrored, transparent, opaque, framing, powering. A non-negotiable substrate within which the players must use machines and other tools. 

Other motifs of interest: light with different properties; a monster whose vision/capacity for apprehension is synonymous with a particular light and its spread through the dungeon; an allied entity with the same gimmick; optical illusions and tricks; the intrusion of the sun, the perfected projector, into all of this.

An illusion dungeon without magic that cuts through the logistics of producing illusionary spaces. 

Onibaba, 1964

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The Process Dungeon

Similar to the above but focused around the manipulation and propagation of various materials - in my mind these are mostly liquids, pumped and drained through the volume of the rooms. As with the Optical Dungeon, the players would have access to different portable machines with different functions, and would need to navigate a fixed architectural space built from surfaces that interact with liquid in various ways: grilles, sluices, piping, pumps, drains, etc. 

Potential liquid mediums: water, petroleum, acid, mercury. Also possible: named liquids with varying degrees of flammability, toxicity, acidity. 

One potentially interesting hook with the Process Dungeon would be to have elements of it be 'customer facing,' as in a bath house or similar - to have the dungeon split into public and off-limits areas, which would also be relatively safe and relatively dangerous. These public areas could be functional or abandoned. 

Another ongoing fixation is a dungeon whose main threat is a disease that is contained inside it, and the main player problematics being how to inoculate and protect themselves from infection. Venturing into a dungeon like this without researching it beforehand is basically certain death, and bringing a virulent and dangerous disease OUT from beneath the earth and into the world is itself interesting. 

The 'worst' of the liquids would be the one that acts as a medium for infection, and that saturates the lowest levels. Maybe it's rotten blood. You would need to drain/pump/dilute/disinfect it. 

Other possibly interesting things: with the correct setup, the dungeon can be turned into a refinery for useful products; there are vast quantities of rare and valuable raw materials here; a table of reactions between processes.

Parsifal, opera film, 1982

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I also realised that there is now quite a lot of content in Magda's Needle! I'm particularly fond of how the Reverse Needle, Mimic Hell and CHAOS ITSELF sections turned out. Maybe it will be of interest to someone collected like this:

• Part One, The Surface
• Set Piece: The Mimic Hell
• The Dungeon: Levels 1 + 2
• Bestiary: The Underworld
• The Dungeon: Level 3
• Set Piece: Ape Monastery
• The Underworld: 3 Locations
• The Tombs of the Maze Builders
• CHAOS ITSELF
• Set Piece: The Reverse Needle
• Bestiary: The Deep, Hot Biosphere

Marebito, 2004