The Best Place in the Barony

 

It has often been remarked that Barony is a horror setting, and this is mostly true. Most of my writing trends into horror eventually, and many of the most influential works on me personally have been horror stories of various kinds. 

It's not only horror though, and I like to try to show that wherever I can. Like all of the fantasy settings I care about, most of what the Barony really is is people living their lives, raising families, finding and losing loves and fortunes - just people, who are of course NOT a horror story, or not only. Recently Loch and Purple challenged me to write up the best place in the Barony as a sort of rejoinder or mirror to this dungeon, and it got me thinking about what a best place, or best places, could be. 

The following is a list for your PC's best places in the Barony - when they tire, or when they feel terror or humiliation, or when they become certain that they will die, they can roll on the table to bring the best place to mind. This has no mechanical function, but collecting these fragments in that slow and accumulative way that we do is how you 'win' this game. 

The table is necessarily crude and inadequate to its purpose, as it is meant as a stand in for any-PC-whatever; to truly make use of it, a player would create their own table (perhaps starting with a simple d4, and adding to it as the character reveals themselves) for each PC.   

A debt is owed to this wonderful post by BD. 

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When you have need of the best place in the Barony, roll a d66 and consult the table:

• 11: The cafes on the main streets around the palace and the great cathedral, where you ordered coffee in the summers and where you first felt yourself being changed by a book. The book (its title and topic are unimportant) seems impossibly grand and baroque, and yet you have an understanding of it - you have a dialogue with its claim, and the dialogue has come from you, and so it represents you. The sun is hot and you are excited and young, and eager to show the world that you exist. 
• 12: Coming to the city for the first time. No one knows you, and you have some money in your bag and a letter if introduction. The lights in the buildings flicker in the evening as the sun drops into the sea, and you eat a cheap meal and watch the sea and feel nearly stricken with the joy of possibility.
• 13: Your children come through their black years intact and you see in their eyes that they recognise you, and that once again they feel love for you - they tell you that they are glad to know you as an adult. 
• 14: The first time you kissed someone that you love and felt them respond to the kiss. You can feel their happy surprise behind the mouth. Both of you try talking and then try laughing with lips pressed together and hands exploring bellies and throats. 
• 15: You and your colleagues have collected yourselves in a local tavern to eat and drink and blow off steam. Your communal work is stressful and sometimes demoralising, but you have come to rely on and trust one another, and tonight you are celebrating some small triumph or other. Camaraderie, bragging, lazy flirtation - later on, dancing and amphetamines. All of you are well paid for your work. 
• 16: Emerging from the fog of some black weight of years into a world that is just as beautiful as it was when you were closed off from it - the day you remember was bright after the Spring rain, and it smelled of storms and broken flower stems. It is like being freed from a box. You have told yourself many times, like a mantra against the humiliation of it, that the darkness is temporary, but the truth in the words is unbearably beautiful. You discover that you are weeping.
• 21: You are very young, maybe not even ten, and you and your friend are climbing the roofs of the capital and telling stories about what you will find there. This is your empire, your adventure fiercely shared.
• 22: When the boat arrived in the harbour island and when you saw the strange and tropically swollen fruit in the market, the fish and the octopuses still moving sinuous on the steel hooks, when you watched the sun set into the sea and turn it to blood. 
• 23: You feel that you are old, and you and your lover have survived all of the damage you did to one another over the years. Now you hold each other, happy and unafraid, in a room that is softly lit with tallow candles, as the winter sleet scours the roof above you. Their scent has never changed in the decades you have known and loved them. 
• 24: You and your friends, desperate for money, travelled from the city many years ago to seek your fortune. Now you return, most of you, with treasure and wisdom and sadness and joy. None of you realised how badly you missed the thousands of roofs and the coloured pennants that snap in the wind and the steeples and the silhouettes of the grand old buildings until you see them and find that none of you can speak.
• 25: Without anyone asking you to, and for no reward other than pleasure, you write a story about some silly thing or other that you have been turning around in your mind - an erotic encounter, a stray thought or insight that struck you as philosophical, an image that shifts its shape pleasantly. When you are finished you can see that the work is rough, but that it captures the thing you set out to express. 
• 26: You were all travelling along the coast and someone suggested that you go swimming. Each of you strip and run across the sand, and in the surf you meet the eyes of someone who you have been thinking about, and they smile at you, and the sky above you is the same colour as the sea, which is blue, a blue that you will never be able to describe, despite serious effort and the help of the one you locked eyes with and have been thinking about recently. Their naked body in the blue sea under the blue sky is so beautiful that you want to laugh or shout or cry or tear at your limbs. Their eyes are smiling and flashing, and they find your ardour funny and attractive. 
• 31: A season spent in solitude, in the high country where snow covers everything. Specifically, a morning spent in absolute tranquility, watching the blanket of pure white from a small square window in the hut that you have been living in alone. Not a single thought in your head. You can physically feel your body unspooling, feel the healing restfulness enter into your airways, your stomach, your brain.
• 32: Years of love shown to and received from your animal companion. Watching them grow old. Providing them comfort in their old age. 
• 33: A youth spent as a mercenary and villain; coming to know yourself in the hard crucible of combat. Learning to trust your strength and your suppleness. Learning to trust your nerves, which never betrayed as they did so many others. The years before age and bitterness and illness take all of this from you, the golden age.
• 34: Sex in summer, with someone that you love, when you have nothing to worry about and feel that you will never work a single day again in your life. 
• 35: That strange pleasure (it is so vivid sometimes) of having a favourite meal prepared for you in a spot that you know well, when the chef does a good (or better than good) job and the food is not so expensive. Perhaps shared or perhaps alone after a day of work.
• 36: Scrapping with the other kids your age at the outskirts of the town, beneath the shadow of one of the great, defunct aqueducts; bleeding and laughing; the shock of being hit in the face, the salt taste of your blood in your cheek; the flares of anger and forgiveness, even forgetting; running around until you are suddenly exhausted from one minute to the next.
• 41: Hearing your mentor explain something obscure to you with infinite trust and patience in your capacities. Their influence, the tracings of their trust in you, will, over the years, unfold inside your brain like a delicate and very beautiful flower. 
• 42: Buying and selling! The joy of it, the excitement, wearing nice clothes and talking well to the ones with the capital. The paintings are gorgeous but you can do better than 'gorgeous', and you can get a better price than they are trying to pay. You and your allies are like raiders, like pirates; serious motherfuckers who can make decisive moves in these high-stakes games.
• 43: The way that you torture yourself with images of them. Exquisite pain. It will kill you if you let it, and you will let it, for many years, and shrivel around the pain. 
• 44: After everything has spent itself and desire and wanting have fled from you - walks in the garden, travelling around the countryside, maybe with a friend, maybe alone, maybe rich, maybe poor. The same impossible questions that grow in your chest and mind, and the same rueful, melancholy joys (or the drunken joys! The roaring, ungrounded joys!) of their non-answers and their sly humour, which looks like death; which approaches death with a glad heart.
• 45: When, after years of searching without knowing that you were, you found the obsessional object equal to your great, calculating, unstoppable desire. It looks like death; it approaches death with a proud face, and hands stained in gore, and a truth that is spelled NO DEFEAT. 
• 46: They publish your book. They really believe in you. It feels like a miracle, or like grace, and for a while it does not matter how it will all turn out in the end. 
• 51: The bath house, steaming, smelling of steam and oils, and the anonymous patrons talking softly and laughing, all of them nude and all of their bodies beautiful. You and the others have come here as an indulgence that you cannot really afford, but today none of you carry this heavily. You eat sugar and drink white spirits and your soul bubbles happily up in your chest and throat. 
• 52: You have found a way of making yourself beautiful - perhaps it is with cosmetics, perhaps with a particular piece, perhaps an outlook, or a mannerism - whatever it is, it is tough and durable, and can be repeated whenever you need it. You think: you are beautiful, and you can be so whenever you wish, and it cannot be taken from you. 
• 53: You put a knife in the heart of your enemy who tormented you. You pissed on the corpse, and you buried them where no one will ever find them. When you remember them now, you laugh. 
• 54: You remember the beauty of the father and the mother who raised you. You can only see them now as memories, and you can only attach your love to memories. You are grateful that nothing was held back between you, even as they grew old and frightened, such that the love adheres easily to the images you still possess. 
• 55: You remember the gymnasium of your youth. You remember being strong and vigorous; the strongest, the most vigorous. You remember being so in love with your body that you could feel it responding to you, feel it swelling and stacking on muscle. Casual nights in the city with the others, lifting weights, sprinting, playing ball games, wrestling. Drinking late into the night, unable to stop smiling.
• 56: The night sky out in the yard where you were born, where you would go to piss in the middle of the night. Freezing, limpid air, the stars above you like a million absolutely perfect stones, riotously clear, nearly (but not quite) contemptuous, and accepting you into that great, blazing clarity.
• 61: You were chosen to join the band of heroes who made the climb up the sheer rock slopes and attacked the fort at night - you were chosen to spike the cannon and open the gates - you hacked necks and hands that night - you and your band were unstoppable - for your service you were gifted honours and quite a lot of money, which you spent on things that amused you. 
• 62: The person that you love more than anyone else bought you something small that makes your life slightly easier. They are happy and excited to give it to you. When you make eye contact you feel your soul against them is both impossibly small and impossibly large.
• 63: For many years you would run outside the outskirts of the capital, through the bramble fields and hills. The air moves easily and well through you; your breath escapes in billowing clouds of steam. 
• 64: Four of you in masks, behind the market, about to swear allegiance to one another. None of you know where it will lead. You all slice palms and make solemn words and afterwards you share a meal. During dinner, each of you speaks about what they want from their life; about love, money, glory, art, justice, god.
• 65: A clear vision of that strange pleasure in identifying an obstacle, and in the same breath knowing exactly how you might surpass and overcome it. The memory is of faces and voices, and of the mental leap: from a problem to a solution. Everything changes in the moment of the leap.
• 66: Baking your skin in the sun. Reading a good book. The sun fades from the sky. You read until the twilight makes it impossible, then you watch the light go out in the horizon, and, when it has disappeared entirely, you begin to make your way back. 

Beyond(?) the Eastern Forests

 

This post is dedicated to the lovely Loch. 

The Forest of Worms is popularly held to be depthless, and exploration from the ground has certainly born this out. Whence then, comes the so-called 'Iron Panoply', which was retrieved about 150 years ago from the swollen stomach of an enormous worm creature during one of their attacks on the fortified border, and which is now kept displayed in the permanent collection of the Scholomance inside a vitrine of glass.

The 'panoply' is actually a single piece of what was presumably once a larger set - a breastplate (and a piece of gorget, fastened with a strange irregular clasp in the shape of a bladed star, now rusted together such that its mechanism is no longer discernable) of curious design, apparently human, but very large, and extremely heavy. The material is also strange, iron certainly, but alloyed with substances unknown to the chemists of the capital. The metal has formed (or grown?) crystalline ridges and striations, which sometimes form into 'spines' or 'blades' across its surface, which keep a fractally sharp edge. One of the many treasures of the Scholomance is a small knife made from one of these 'spines', once worn by the chancellor in a ceremonial sheath about the neck, but in modern times displayed with the other famous arms of that ancient institution in its grandest halls. 

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Knowledge of the last flight of the Sphinx-Eater is a closely guarded secret, even inside the Baroness' elite spy services. She has run many programs over the years to attempt to reverse engineer the great balloon craft of the White City - once understood, the principles of lighter-than-air travel of this sort are not so difficult to put into practice - but she is always careful not to do so too publicly. The boundaries of Imperial tolerance towards their 'little brothers and sisters' in the Barony have been known to collapse without warning where military technologies are concerned. The Sphinx-Eater was the most successful of her prototypes, swift, reliable, and capable of propellor propulsion while air-born. 

The Sphinx-Eater was stolen by the Baroness' old spy masters; two of her closest friends, Thomas and Chrysanth Wighter, who were also husband and wife. The three of them fought together in their younger mercenary days, and at that time they were known to be inseparable. The Wighters were an indispensable piece of the machinery that facilitated the Baroness' rise to political power, and were very often the muscle (or indeed the blade) that facilitated it. They were also celebrated adventurers and heroes in their own right, and travelled the world entire with many strange companions in pursuit of riches and glory for their patron. They presided over the Baroness' spy service for nearly three decades, and had her complete trust as advisors, seconds, companions, and, if rumours are to be believed, occasional lovers. 

The Wighters had many children. Their eldest was a son named Richart, who, with markedly less success than his parents, pursued a life as an adventurer and hired sword. Following baseless rumours of treasure in the forests along the border, he hired a band of ruffians and with them penetrated too far in and became trapped there, unable to fight his way out through the seas of bodies that swarmed about them. His parents, knowing him to be under-intelligent and over-ambitious, were in the habit of having him followed and reported on, and when the they heard of his situation they provisioned the Sphinx-Eater and stole her for her last voyage. 

They arrived at the forest too late to save Richart, and, tragically, as they attempted to retrieve his torn body from the forest floor, somehow allowed the steering equipment on the Sphinx-Eater to be damaged. They were able to safely retreat back to the crippled airship, but were powerless to stop its flight into the unknown east across the tops of the great trees. Patriots to the end, the Wighters decided to make good use of the four messenger birds they had on board, and report their findings from the air at these extremest edges of the known world, before their inevitable deaths by privation.

What the contents of those four messages were, none but the Baroness and her chief advisors know, but air travel of any kind over the forested territories has been expressly forbidden and strictly enforced at her order. The Barony is a fragile island in an unending sea of terror and chaos. So it is said, and so it has ever been. 

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Several years ago, the Baroness' name appeared in the proscriptions, and she was nearly assassinated by a conspiracy of angels and church priests. During the bloody purges that followed the church was quite radically restructured, and the spy services earned (more than once) their red-handed reputation, and the whole affair was kept as quiet as anyone could reasonably keep it. 

During this coup, one of the infamous Church Assassins, who had taken the side of the conspirators and begun a spree of massacre and decapitation inside the Baronial palaces, happened by chance upon a room of sealed reports and other paraphernalia collected by field agents in the spy service. Using coded shorthand, he transcribed as much of the information as he was able - focussing at first on the details of the infiltration of the church by the Baroness' agents - on lists of names, on double and triple agents, the addresses of safe houses, etc. - but then, as he searched for more detail, on a strange series of reports on what he termed the 'great eastern expanse'. The coded messages were sold on the black market by a church official, trying (ultimately unsuccessfully) to raise funds and flee the capital with her life. They read as follows:

• Red earth, red sun(s plural?), a great field of bodies. Everything is red in this place. The bodies are burned up/swallowed by the suns, and the suns burn/swallow one another. The bodies speak by a mechanical transcription of the limbs: they speak the names of the suns. 
• Great red trees, which hold up suns and bodies. The trees are arranged: both regular and symmetrical (emphasis in the original).
• Larger shapes within this configuration: black, not red, shapes of madness. Beasts perhaps, and very large, no two alike. Sometimes the shapes of people too in all the redness, but too large. The people tend(?) the trees and tend(?) the beasts, they are shod in black iron, they are symmetrical but not regular (emphasis in the original). 
• The bodies in the red earth speak the names of the people who are shod in iron by mechanical transcription of the limbs. 

Their Submission Only Shames the Victor - Third and Fourth Days on Brythwin Island

 

When last we left our intrepid heroes, they had set up camp on the storm-locked island of Brythwin, clashed with and murdered some of the locals, and scouted and mapped the surface ruins and buildings. More and more the various entryways down into the underworld beckon - but first, the Swallows decide to send a diplomatic delegation to the local cat population, whose base they had discovered on their arrival to the island. Curiously, in the tumult of the storm, a perpetual sunbeam shines down in the vicinity of the cat fort - what might lie at its terminus?

The away party, which leaves in the afternoon of the second day, consists of Gwynnfain the Errant, Deaths Adorn Her the Terror Bird, CCC the Cat, Yseult the Mentat, and 'Professor' December August, the Academic. They prepare food for offerings of peace, and trek into the northern swamps of the island. The going is arduous and boggy, but they make decent time - as they approach the northern shore, they realise that they are being tracked by four cat braves. CCC challenges them, and they bicker amongst themselves before disappearing back into the long grasses. Deaths Adorn Her decides to scout up ahead as the party continue their way, and breaks the vegetation line on the shore - a welcome party of cat 13 warriors, one quite a bit larger than the others, with its face dipped in blood. Behind them, the sunbeam terminates on a large outcrop of rock, and atop the rock is a huge house cat (like lion sized), apparently snoozing in the warmth. The good Bird leaves rations as a gift, and returns to the party to make her avian report. The rest of them emerge from the grass-line about ten minutes later, and take in their welcoming party. 

Negotiations open with another gift - this time one of the smoking hookahs from the camp, which was bought for the purpose. There is a general feeling in the party that if they can get the cats smoking amphetamines or similar, they will be in a good position. Sadly they never get to explain the use of the hookah; the larger blood-faced cat yells a challenge, and CCC answers it: they are here to parley, to broker peace.

This actually goes pretty well despite some braggadocio and insulting swagger from the cat side, not to mention tittering and silliness from the scatterbrained braves assembled behind their leader. The gifts are accepted, and terms of non-aggression agreed to. Buoyed by this success, CCC tries to push the discussion in more abstract and human-accepting territory (the cats of the island seem to hate humans), which does no go down well at all. The cat leader tells them to leave and sends for reinforcements - not wanting to risk open confrontation, the party retreat back into the reeds and make back towards the camp. 

On the way they are ambushed by an enormous cocodril, which erupts from the water of the marsh and tries to catch the errant Gwynnfain in its jaws. I make an error here and add the wrong to-hit bonus - it should actually have hit and done 2d6 damage, enough to take off a limb or even put the errant in the ground - but instead, in our reality, it misses and is swiftly dispatched by the crew. 

They return to the camp cautiously optimistic about the success of the mission, and with a good deal of information about the forces and disposition of the cat enclave, as well as valuable intel about the sunbeam.

THIRD DAY

The next morning, it is decided that they will venture into the underworld proper. A really large party are assembled for the purpose, ten all told, consisting of: Ganzorig, Leopold, Maud the Fighter, Deaths Adorn Her, Gwynfainn, Glaumring, the Professor, CCC, Hyacinth the Fairy, and Yseult. It was an experiment on my part for running large groups - more on how it turned out at the end of this section.  

The first order of business was dealing with the two gigantic crystal mannequins inside the northern panopticon. The party designed and produced rope snares for them, and, after scoping out the area as best they could, entered the Panopticon proper for the first time. The statues prove inanimate, although a magical once-over by the Professor reveals that they are 'absent', whatever that means. The Professor then allows one of xir entities to possess their body briefly to look for secrets - which goes smoothly - after finding nothing, the entity leaves of its own accord. As a side note, I am absolutely thrilled with how Barony entity magic is working out in play. I genuinely wasn't sure what to expect, but managing the stable of NPC spells and personalities in concert with Zmia has been a joy. 

Seeing no danger, the party tie the statues up securely, and thoroughly search the interior of the panopticon. They find it disappointingly empty, save for some strange machinery at the top of the central iron tower: a for of vertical point cannon barrel, with four broad slots in its base. They try to fiddle with it or turn it on, but there don't seem to be any controls really, so after a few minutes they leave it be. They also find a large drain hole in the centre of the floor that leads down into blackness (and inside which they can hear running water), but decide to leave that too, and make for one of the external staircases down into the earth. 

Once underground, they discover what is essentially a very large, white-tiled drain system of rooms and corridors full of fast-rushing water. In the map below (produced by the players), they begin in the small, north-most room. They discover many locked iron doors, and also a shaft that leads further down (the first branch to the south), with what appears to be complicated elevator chains and machinery. They drop a lit torch down this shaft and it falls for nearly 200ft before bouncing off something and extinguishing. 

In the large circular room to the left the look up to see the underside of the panopticon, and graffiti that reads: WE ENTERED HERE. ALL IS WELL.

The mapped portion of the drains. 

They continue further to along the system of drains, until halfway down the southern corridor, when they pass by a room that is richly furnished, lit, and kitted out with perfume braziers. It's still a white-tiled drain room, just full of nice furniture (it appears to be some sort of dining room). The iron-bar door to this room is locked, and as they think about what to do about it they hear something moving along the corridor towards them from the west. 

Emerging into the light are 14 horrible, pale, segmented worm-like centipede creatures: 8 on the raised walkway that the party are standing on, and 6 more in the water. As they come on, Gwynfainn fires a gout of burning fuel from his bulky flamethrower Sunset and Evening Star, and kills three of the creatures, while Maud fires her pistol but narrowly misses. The corridor is filled with gun-smoke. The Professor uses a webbing spell to slow the advance of the vermin and allows another round of ranged fire, which Gwynfainn takes advantage of to fire the flamethrower again. Another two of the insects are burned to nothing, before those that survive crash into the party and start trying to overwhelm them. Vicious melee fighting breaks out, and the heavy plate armour of the front line fighters saves them from taking damage. It take a few rounds, but the creatures are dismembered without too much fuss. In the final seconds of the melee, Deaths Adorn Her looks back through the dining room door and sees something unexpected: a large, muscular man in a tuxedo, with a panther's head, holding two pistols, which are pointed directly at her her. 

The imperious Terror Bird lets out a scream, trying to intimidate this strange figure, which works - his morale breaks, and he fires both guns at once, one the bird, and one at Maud, who is tanding next to her. The bullet passes cleanly through Deaths Adorn Her's wing, instantly reducing her to 0 hit points - by the rules we are following, this does not down her, but she is in a very bad way. The second bullet is deflected off Maud's plate. More billowing smoke fills the room, and the panther-man escapes into an adjoining space. The party quickly apply a vial of acid to the lock on the door, and hear the pistoleer yelling a warning to someone he calls 'you Majesty'. 

Ripped Panther guy with pistols and tux

The fairy stealthily flies into the second room where the cat-man in the suit is busy reloading his pistols, and where he sees a second figure join - an even bigger, more ripped, more fierce looking specimen, with a tiger's head, a crown and costume worked with gold and jewels, and a great and terrible white sword. 

At this point we had been playing for nearly four hours, and it was nearly 3am for some of us. Some of the group were finding it difficult to keep up with what was happening, and we had a quick discussion about how to end the session - should we simply cut and hope that everyone could make it for the next one? Something else?

After a bit of back and forth, I had the tiger-headed king take the situation in hand, and offer a ceasefire, an apology for his man Senechal's jumpiness, and a formal invitation to dinner in the future. He also bade the adventurers beware the 'King of Serpents' and the 'King of Vermin'. The party, who have been sorely starved for loot and XP in this game, all 👀 at the crown and other finery, but they also agree to retreat for the time being. 

Back on the surface, they cart the statues back into camp for a paltry 25 XP apiece. Still, lots of mapping done, the panopticon cleared, talking NPCs met and parleyed with, tangible loot located, and no one dead - the first foray into the underworld a success by most measures! They decide to bury the statues in the earth, to forestall any difficulties if they start walking around. 

FOURTH DAY

The fourth day sees a smaller party, composed of Leo, Deaths Adorn Her, Ysault, and Hyacinth, return to the barracks building where Euphemia the bravo was nearly burned to death last time. This time they take hands form the camp - five attendants, with digging tools - and the mannequin soldiers they picked up with their requisition before they left. 

They decide that they would like to try to dig into the 'gnome shaft' that they saw last time, but after some difficulty trying to use sledgehammers to break open the concrete slab that the brick building rests on, they come to the conclusion that this will probably be more trouble than it's worth. 

Hyacinth the fairy does a scouting fly-through of the interior, and discovers that more of the flammable hallucinogenic sludge has been applied throughout the building, and also that the XP-giving fruit in the central garden has been mostly stripped away. More importantly, Hyacinth discovers two more small humanoids, waiting in the tunnel with tallow candles, ready to set the mess alight. 

There is some discussion around what is going on here. Do these beings just sit around all day waiting to burn strangers? Are these guards? What is this hole? The party decides to send Bellaphon, the iron mannequin soldiers, in through the front, and, seeing that he meets with no resistance, quickly follow him inside. Having been debriefed by Hyacinth, they know the location of their enemies, and decide to throw bottles of petrol into the hole and hope that the candles carried by their foes will ignite the mixture. 

They do so, successfully, and burn the unfortunate things to death in the hole - then they set about making the space secure, searching all of the rooms (they find a large mirror and a bottle of petrol in one room, but no other loot), and opening the front doors such that Deaths Adorn Her can join them. Then they decide to inspect the hole, and the corpses in it. 

The corpses appear to be small, four-foot-tall humanoids of some kind, with long white hair and red eyes. The tunnel, which is extremely tight, drops away at a 45 degree angle into blackness. Hyacinth the fairy, carrying a lit match, can get about 50ft in before the light source goes out. The party decide to send the second mannequin, Selinae, who is made from cloth, in with him, holding the lantern for light. The two of them do this easily enough, and discover that the shaft zig-zags back forth, always heading down into the earth. After about 300 ft, Hyacinth hears something ahead of him - a hum like a high voltage power line. Then he sees something horrible. It's like a small face nested inside a human-sized head, which it has drawn around itself like a skin hoodie. This face sits just at the edge of the lantern light, staring horribly and blocking off the tunnel in front of them. The humming is very loud. The fairy and the mannequin start to retreat back up the tunnel, and the horrible head/face follows them, keeping pace at the terminus of the light. 

After 40 minutes or so, Hyacinth emerges back out of the tunnel and tries to tell the party what he has seen. They gather that there is something horrible and dangerous inside the shaft, and start to talk about what to do before they start hearing the humming noise rising up from the depths. Hyacinth starts freaking out, and the rest of the party, thoroughly spooked, leave the building as fast as they can. 

Once outside, they gather together to plan what to do. Eventually they decide that they want to block the tunnel mouth with the mirror (entities are frightened of mirrors), and quietly head back inside, where they can still hear the horrible hum coming from the kitchen where the shaft terminates. They look inside at for a brief instant see the head/face for themselves, popped up out of the entrance, staring at them. Then it disappears back down and is gone. The humming grows softer. The party decide that they don't want any part of this bullshit, and immediately empty 10 INV of petrol (extended to 30 INV by mixing it carefully with the flammable and soluble residue that these things seem to use for traps) down the hole, and setting it alight. It burns fiercely and starts filling the room with smoke - a few minutes later they hear a strange, loud, sharp BANG from somewhere within. Then they decide to head back to camp. 

Yseult, who does not need to breath and as such is not perturbed by the smoke, stays behind with Bellaphon for a few final tasks - he blocks the mouth of the tunnel with heavy steel and furniture, and, using a bola, affixes a rope to the ceiling of the two story building, which will make climbing to the roof easier in future. Then he takes a vantage there to see if anything in the ruins is responding to the smoke, and sees nothing moving. 

Back at camp, they perform autopsies on the diminutive corpses, and find them distressingly human...

 

Food, continued

 

This post dedicated to the lovely Zmia Garinia. 

A continuation from this post, this time focused solely on the Barony itself. Baronials farm in sustainable and out-of-focus ways, because I don't know much about farming. The Barony is fairly sparsely populated compared to its neighbours, and its food requirements are not centrally organised. The Baroness takes a great interest in the possibilities of modernising this system, and imposing better state information-gathering and direct taxation and control. 

The Traveller's Meal

Nearly always fried grain porridge with salted meat mixed through it, flavoured with wild berries, nuts, whatever spices or greens can be foraged, or candied fruit for the wealthy. Oil, porridge grains, salt-meat, and ground coffee are the traveller's necessaries, and all provisioners and merchants will keep a supply in stock due to the insatiable demand. Where does the coffee come from? Probably the mountains. 

The Poor Meal

Superficially similar to the Traveller's meal, but served at the table, and served with smokable stimulants. With a kitchen available the porridge grains can instead be served as bread, and coarse, unleavened bread baked with salt-meat is the archetypal street and poor staple in the cities. It is considered polite to augment the meal as best you can, but forage is less available in the cities, and no one will take offence to a plain meal of fried bread, meat (or seafood), coffee, and water. Drugs are typically smoked together after the meal, to aid in digestion and social bonding; these are usually stimulants, but could also easily be narcotics or sedatives if that suits the mood or time of day better. Baronials typically like smoking their own pipes, but some professional groups, gangs, and fixers (and soldiers) develop a taste for instead smoking from communal hookahs. The kitchen is the most usual place for smoking to happen, and for this reason usually has openable windows to air the room in the aftermath. 

The Polite Meal

A Baronial of middling means will provide fresh meat, produce, and fresh bread for a main meal, and a second course of fruit, fried day-old bread, and sugar, if they can afford it. Seafood is particularly loved, and cheap due to proximity to the coast, and fish, shellfish, and octopus are a sort of mobile addition to any course - they are typically rubbed in salt and served in their own small bowls, which are passed around as and when. 

The fruit that you serve is a status symbol: everyone loves blackberries, but they are common as dirt. Imported fruit from the mountains, and even further north, signal that extra care and expense have gone into a meal: appropriate for employers, elder family members, celebrations, etc. 

Heated white spirits are usually served alongside cold water and coffee, and even sparkling water if the money is there. Fruit liqueurs are available but generally considered an affectation for the wealthy. Smoking happens afterwards, and can include more expensive/culturally middle-class hallucinogens, especially if the family is connected in some way to the academies or the production of art.  

The Rich Meal

A third course is added to the basic meal structure for the wealthy: the desert, which consists of baked pastries, imported sugar candies, flavoured ices, syrups, and sweet liqueurs. Traditionally the desert is the same 'course' the smoking, and the two typically blend together in wealthy households. Chefs and chemists in wealthy houses are renowned for curating this third course into pleasant trips of various kinds, and if it goes wrong they can be reprimanded. 

For truly special or ceremonial events, the wealthy of the capital enjoy composing meals into 'scenes', loaded with legible decision points that will only be picked up on by others who have too much spare time on their hands. Rare imported animals, fruits and vegetables, and strange sauces and glazes (which are largely alien to Baronial cooking) are common in this practice. The point is to bring the guest into your thought process behind the meal, and discussing the 'story' or symbolism that the guests are picking up on at the table is encouraged - something like a formal parlour game.  

The Sacred Meal

Fried human blood, taken from a victim of the lists, or from a member of the clergy, or from a rich patron of the church: all three sources are given equal honour. Simple oat cakes fried in the blood, then sugared. These flat cakes are then garnished with simple forage and white alcohol.

All priests can prepare this meal, and the church will typically provide it for those who cannot otherwise provide for themselves. Supplies of blood are kept on hand, and the proportion of blood to oil when preparing the cakes is a measure of the solemnity of the occasion. 

In more ancient times the clergy were said to eat the viscera and flesh of the victims of the list, but this is no longer acceptable in common society. 

The Spa Meal

Spas, bath-houses, and saunas are an imported luxury in the Barony, but an absolutely beloved one. The sauna originates on the steppe, and bath-house in the mountains, and the Baronials love both of them and spend as much leisure time as they can partaking. 

There is a special type of food that is provided and appropriate for the bath house or spa - no fried meats or other fatty food, but instead a variety of cheap, salty or sugared oat cake that comes singly skewered on steel toothpicks, or in large glass containers when bought in bulk, and hot and cold fresh water to rehydrate. Many are the tales of rival bravos in the spa houses trying to kill one another with broken bottles and steel toothpicks. 

Also popular are single-use salt and hard-sugar 'lick' jewellery, typically set in cheap tin fixings and worn at the throat. One member of a party will wear the 'lick', and their companions will make use of it over the course of the session - for the service, their friends will pick up their tab.

Fruit is also common in the richer bath-houses, where individuals can also typically pay for service of coffee and alcohol as they relax. 

The Forest of Worms, continued

 

This post is dedicated to the lovely Purple. 

The Forest of Worms stretches off endlessly into the east at the border of cleared Baronial territory. It houses the worms themselves, in their teeming, uncounted millions, and the roaming bands of Little Birds, and for these reasons is commonly acknowledged as impassable. This has not stopped people from trying it. 

In the ancient days of the pre-Imperial Barony there were great heroes, ten feet tall, fifteen feet, in monstrous bronze harness and adorned in chains of cut glass and lead, who pushed the borders of the forest from the coast to where it stands today. They were invincible, they piled the bodies of worms so high that they made hills and mountains. The so-called 'Great Proscriptions' of the ancient angels designated entire territories and countries for extermination. God's design in those days required a more vigorous pruning, and men were giants then; well-practised at slaughter. So the old stories go.

In the present day, there have been many expeditions and felling operations into the woods, and nearly all of them meet with disaster and death. There are simply too many worms to kill once you get into the trees any distance. The official stance from the Capital is that attempts to change the border are illegal - the Baroness (most would say astutely) fears provoking the great hives further in to open conflict on her borders. 

Unofficially, she has sent many skilled operatives and teams into the forest - not to kill and destroy and conquer, but to gather intelligence, and perhaps even to emerge from the forest at its far side, if such a thing exists. The picture is forming, very slowly.

The Hives

After a few miles into the trees, it becomes nearly literally impossible to avoid detection by the worms. You can avoid them by staying in the tree canopy, but it is difficult and dangerous to travel this way at any speed. 

Where worm concentrations are critical they cover the floor in a literal carpet of flesh. There have been scattered reports of very large bodies, or perhaps of concentrations of smaller bodies pressed together, half buried in the earth, disgorging worms in the hundreds. 

The worm-sign pictograms begin to appear on trees, and stones, and on the bare earth, and the air gets 'heavier', the further you go in. Some of her agents swear that the sign appears on clouds, on the sun, that the sky itself twists into the terrible, elaborated letterforms. In some places the trees themselves are buried in the depth of the carpet of worm bodies. It is like hell. 

Dead Zones

Large circular spaces exist inside the woods where the worms will not go for some reason. The forest in these spaces is pristine, clear, bright, sun-drenched. No animals, no people. 

Some of them appear to built around mounds or barrows of some description, others have no clear cause.  

Worm Pattern-Body

A mess of smaller bodies complexly interlinked, sometimes mechanically via their limbs, sometimes using various specialised organs on the surfaces of their bodies. A vast system built from bodies. About twenty feet tall, and twice as broad. Usually builds worms from the bodies of other worms, and whatever other biomass that is comes across. 

HD14, d8 unarmed attacks on everything in melee contact, Maker, unarmoured, but slabs of redundant flesh and organs confer -2 damage to weapons attacks. Movement: immobile, usually actually mostly buried in the earth. Disposition: mindless, or at least uninterested in the physical world. 

Maker: every time you take damage from a Pattern-Body, you must test CHAR or lose a point of CHAR. If this ever brings would below 10, you lose your name: rewrite it as 'nameless' on your character sheet. You now lose contested CHAR checks automatically. While you sleep your body may attempt to scratch it back into your skin - this is compulsive behaviour, and will not bring the name back. 

Ancient Assassin

Truly ancient heroes from the times of madness and religious massacre. Each Assassin was given a guardian angel and a territory to subdue - the living instruments of a utopian/abstract project of levelling and rebuilding. There are none left now, for they fought and died a thousand years ago. 

HD12, Slaying Falx x3 (gigantic weapon, deals one point of radiation damage per turn to every other living thing within 50ft), Bronze Panoply as plate armour, movement: twice human, like an iron golem, the mass of heavy demolition equipment, disposition: they have a spatially-defined territory to subdue, your name is not on their short list of exceptions. 

Wyrm-Slaying Angel

The disembodied guardian spirits of the old Baronials - little in common with the timid time-travellers of the present day. An eye, and a voice, and a terrible spear, with no patience at all for philosophy or tricky theological language games. Manifest as a single floating eyeball above the heads of their sainted companions, and constantly scream praise to the coming Heaven in Enochian. 

3HD, but disembodied and not usually targetable - psychic damage and similar will do the trick. Armed with the Wyrm-Slaying Spear, unarmoured, but SINGS PRAISE, only moves with its companion, disposition: grindhouse facilitator of absolutely total war. 

Wyrm-Slaying Spear: each turn, lay down an area 100ft long and 5ft wide. Those caught beneath it take d10 radiation damage as their organs boil inside them. 

SING PRAISE: all movement toward the Wyrm-Slaying Angel is reduced by 10ft. 

Tattooing in the Barony

 

This post is dedicated to the lovely Semiurge. 

Tattooing in the Barony is not commonly practiced - the art is associated with the nomads from the south, and visible tattoos will mark you as a foreigner. There are a couple of notable exceptions to this; the most common and visible are the mercenary fighter cults. 

These groups are semi-secret societies within mercenary companies - in the south of the Barony, near to the border, many of them practice something that they call 'enlightened chivalry', a type of appropriation and admixture of nomadic moral tenets, tied to questing, artistic and poetical practice, and the protection of the weak and defenceless. The members of these fighter cults swear oaths to one another, and are forbidden from marrying or bearing children. They go 'questing' together in small groups while the mercenary company are out of work or billeted, and the more philosophical among them will have lots to say (and often lots to write) about how pragmatism should always be tempered by idealism. 

Nomads tattoo their bodies for all sorts of reasons - with maps of the heavens and waterways, with great deeds and bonds of fealty, with marks of great wealth, honourable conduct, and good legal standing. Nomads tend to have a mutable fluency with tattooed imagery, and take pride in striking or unexpected compositions and pairings. The mercenaries have a more culturally Baronial approach, and their tattoos tend to be more formally codified in discreet pictographic 'languages' - the sun on the belly for a leader, a bramble crown for one who speaks with invisible things, birds for marksmen, snakes for Arditi, etc. Mercenaries are like pop stars in Baronial polite society, and these barbarous affectations are broadly tolerated and even celebrated.

The other exception is religious. There are academic heretics who contend that, when the mind is brought into the Material Heaven, so too is the body, in the exact state it was in when it died. Since the Heaven is perpetual, they believe that anything committed to the 'text' of the eternal body is preserved for all time. These poor fools tattoo whatever they think deserves to survive in perpetuity this way - what they personally identify as the most important sentences, equations, diagrams etc. for passage into the future. Some of them also have an unsavoury habit of forcibly tattooing the soon-to-die, viewing their ailing bodies as priceless time capsules into the infinite. 

The actual specifics of the tattoos tend towards the saccharine and over-personal. Particularly abject specimens have crossed out and inked over sections of text; evidence of embarrassment over texts that they once thought profound. Unlike most heretical academics, body-writers are actively despised by both the church and general population, and are often stoned or beaten to death in the streets when discovered. 

Baronial Jackets

 

A particular type of loot that you will only find in the Barony. The jacket is the most important part of Baronial dress and custom, and a properly tailored and fitted jacket made with expensive materials is the quickest way to signal your social standing to a crowd of Baronials. They are mostly cut square-shouldered, and typically flat to the body (one of the reasons many Baronial women bind their chests). A dizzying profusion of fabrics, worked ornamentation, and stitching, collaring, hemming, and lining styles exist, and the fashion-conscious Capital types will try to stay on-style where they can. 

In the provinces and petty kingdoms, more staid and classical styles prevail, and ostentation is considered garish and childish. Most nobility will have a recogniseable style associated with their house (in much the same way as jewellery), and individual flourishes will derive from that standardised form. 

A jacket takes up 1 INV to transport without damaging it, or 3/INV if you don't care about that.

It has a cut, lining, material, accents, and ornamentation, rolled on the tables below. 

Its worth in silver is calculated by the fineness of the tailoring, the rarity and beauty of the material, and the 'boldness' or 'risk' of the whole. Boldness is not always a positive: a risky design that comes off will be more a lot more than something 'safer', but has a greater chance of becoming laughable, and thus worth nothing at all.

When determining the worth of a jacket, add together the material, accent and ornamentation values - this is the base value of the jacket. 

Boldness is a random number between 1 and 4. When you attempt to sell the jacket, roll equal to or over the boldness on a d4 to multiply the value by the boldness score. If instead to roll under the boldness, the jacket is judged garish or naive, and worth 0.1 of the normal price. 

If the jacket is damaged in any way its value is 0.25 usual. 

The above rules assume that you spend at least one entire day doing nothing but trying to sell an individual piece to known, interested buyers. If selling in bulk (when found as loot, jackets will often come in entire wardrobes), instead use the following:

Roll material, accent, and ornamentation once for every 5 jackets in the wardrobe, or for every 20 if it is very large. Use the lowest values generated, and then half that numbers - this is the base cost for each item. Jackets sold in bulk this way do not have a 'boldness', and you might be able to slip some damaged items in (certainly no more than 1 in 5) without the buyer realising. 

Cut

• 1 - 6: Classic. A box-cut, short hemmed, lapel-less, gender-neutral light jacket. Most people in the Barony, even in poor families, will own one of these for special occasions or serious meetings where propriety is important. You can buy a 'basic' - that is, a cheap, tailored, un-ornamented cotton jacket in this cut - for about 15s in most settlements, and wearing one is considered 'good enough' or 'passing' by most people. Occasions where Baronials will expect you to be in a jacket: any meeting with nobility or a potential employer, and meeting with a priest or saint, when working in a public-facing professional role. Even most of the expensive and gorgeous jackets in the Barony are patterned on this style. 
• 7: Masculine/Feminine. Popularly known as a 'popped' or 'alter' jacket - tailored to accentuate the bust and hips and face (for a feminine jacket), or the shoulders, throat, and wrists (for a masculine). Will always raise an eyebrow in professional company, and can be outright banned in the provinces. Nonetheless, a popular option for young hotheads and firebrands. The masculine/feminine split does not cleanly map to men and women - a man wearing a 'feminine' cut is just as bold and a man wearing a 'masculine' one, and the same holds for women. A Masculine/Feminine jacket rolls a d3+1 in place of a d4 for its Boldness score. 
• 8: Long. Long jackets that reach to the thigh, or even below the knee in some examples. Extremely, even embarrassingly, old-fashioned in the Capital, but still sometimes seen in the petty kingdoms as a marker of noble rank. There are Bravos in the Capital who wear long jackets to signal that they have moved truly beyond the judgement of society. Long jackets are typically worth 0.75 the usual to buyers outside of the provincial nobility. 
• 9: Hooded. Not often seen in the cities, and strongly linked to mercenary and kill team culture. They are usually called campaign jackets, or sometime 'militants', and wearing them is a bit like wearing an army uniform in public, with the associated risk of being found out and having the shit kicked out of you by real mercenaries if it turns out that you are not one. The hood is typically loose, and sometime detachable - designed to be worn over the top of helmets, or even attached to arming harness. 
• 10: 'Total'. The so-called 'total' jacket is a recent innovation, a cultural import from the White City, and is essentially a tailored and ornamented one-piece flight or boiler suit. They are sought-after and expensive, and also borderline scandalous in polite company. In the capital a 'total' signals modernity and keen aesthetic sense - in the provinces you can offer grave offence by even suggesting wearing one. A Total jacket rolls a d3+1 in place of a d4 for its Boldness score, and is additionally worth 1.5 (in the capital) or .1 (everywhere else) after all other modifiers have been taken into account.     

Material

• 1 - 5: Cotton. The most common fabric for Baronial jackets, dyed and cut in a profusion of different styles and fashions. It can be sewn tight or loose, draped and collected, and is medium hard-wearing. If the Baronials had a business suit, it would be a cotton jacket (to show tasteful restraint), accented with expensive ornamentation (to show wealth and personality). 50s. 
• 6 - 7: Wool. Heavy, harder-wearing, typically dyed-in, woven as a piece, and as such very slightly less formally adaptable than cotton. A good woollen jacket will also insulate you in the winter. Some Baronials prefer it to cotton, and expressing taste this way is well within acceptable societal bounds. 50s. 
• 8: Bouclé. A tricky and expensive wool-cotton blend, considered beautiful and appropriate for formal settings and celebrations. Many of the best tailors in the Capital will only work in bouclé. Always acceptable and aspirational, even when techincally off-fashion. 100s. A jacket made from boucle rolls it boldness on a d3 instead of a d4. 
• 9: Rag. Rag is a fabric created by laboriously sewing together offcuts - it is new, modern, fashionable, and much-maligned by the powers that be. Rag can be dyed after its construction, or worked into untouched. It lends a jacket a very recogniseable shaggy, 'dense' look. Equally beloved by bravos, students, and wealthy young aristocrats. 75s. A jacket made in rag rolls Boldness on a d3+1 instead of a d4, and in general cannot be sold to the nobility. Some conservative tailors will loathe you on principle for wearing this in public. 
• 10: Chiffon. Sheer, nearly weightless, expensive to import from the north. Extremely eye-catching, though not universally loved - many Baronials lament the lack of surface texture, and the difficulty of incorporating ornamentation. It is not often used for an entire garment, and may only be work into the sleeves, as an example. 150s, but no roll on the Ornamentation table. 

 

Lining

• 1 - 5: Cotton. The most common lining for jackets - inexpensive, comfortable, easily dyed and sewn, relatively hard-wearing. Safe and respectable.   
• 6 - 7: Quilted. Thermal layering that will keep you warm in the cold Baronial winter. Bulks up the silhouette quite a bit, which some people like and some people hate. Wearing this out of season marks you as eccentric. Rarely, jackets will be cut to mimic the thicker shape without the thermal qualities.  
• 8: Proofed. A 'proofed' jacket incorporates actual protective elements into the lining, typically bands of iron, but sometimes also simple layered fabric armour. Baronial tailors are very good at getting the lines 'right', and making this process difficult to spot, but most natives will mark it quickly. A proofed jacket counts as (expensive, exquisite) light armour. 
• 9: Pockets. Most baronial jackets eschew pockets, because they are thought to detract from the elegance or beauty of the 'classic' shapes. Some mercenaries, fixers, and other professionals sew pockets (mock or functional) into the outside of their jackets to symbolise their professionalism. Some sew pockets into the lining, to carry pipes, necessaries, and sometimes concealed weapons - this is considered rough and uncouth behaviour, and sewing them in would be unbecoming of a 'real' tailor. You probably won't be able to sell a jacket with pockets sewn in to anyone in the nobility. 
• 10: 'Mirrored'. An alchemically treated lining - not actually mirrored in any real sense, but shifting, opalescent, 'metallic' fabric, which many people consider beautiful. Even those who find it hideous will accept that it is fantastically expensive to produce. A jacket with a mirrored lining is worth 1.5 its usual price after all other modifiers have been taken into account. It is not typically used as a shell due to its sensitivity to weather and the elements. 

Accent

• 1 - 4: None. Sometimes the classics need no embellishment. 
• 5 - 6: Piping. Piping is a recent innovation in the capital, and serves to accentuate and offset the cut, colouration, and fabric choices of a jacket. Broadly considered a virtuous invention, even by purists and pedants. No one will look twice at it. 
• 7: Lapels. Lapels are associated with Stewards, military officers, politicians, and the ultra-formal tuxedo-shape. It is very presumptuous to add them to your jacket if you do not hold some high office or position of rank - something like designing and wearing your own military uniform or military medals. Jackets with lapels sewn in are generally second hand, passed down from those who have earned them. Some bravos like the look and don't care what other people think. 
• 8: Wrist and Throat Ties. A common accent that mimics Baronial throat and wrist jewellery without the associated cost. Considered in good taste, and appropriate for work clothing. The ties can be simple bows, or worked into decorative knots and other flourishes. Adds 10s to a jacket's value.  
• 9: Puffed and Slashed. Ostentatious, tough, amusing, 'party wear', sometimes worn for duels and other physical confrontations, or when someone needs to signal bravery and prowess. Mercenaries and bravos love puffed sleeves, and most wealthy Baronials will have a set to put on if they need to. Not needing to put the sleeves on is a core part of what an adult Baronial would consider social and political success, but you'd be a fool to get rid of them entirely. Adds 10s to a jacket's value.  
• 10: Belting/Chest-Rig. A working person's embellishment - leather ties at the joints to keep the fabric close to the body. Might even incorporate mock or functional arming points for harness, and sheathes, holsters, tools, &c. A fixer might wear a chest rig to a meeting with their client to signal pragmatism and ruthlessness. Adds 20s to a jackets value when selling to someone who might appreciate the specific rig, and -20s to someone who doesn't care. 

Ornamentation

• 1 - 4: None. Simplicity itself. You might receive muted appreciation for your restraint and good taste. 
• 5 - 6: Fabric Roses. A Baronial standard with an extremely long history, and the type of ornamentation most strongly associated with Baronials in the minds of foreigners. Fabric roses are archetypal, and truly timeless. Labour intensive to produce, very beautiful, and nearly always appreciated. Fabric roses confer a -1 to Boldness, and add 25s to a jacket's value. 
• 7: Scene Work. An uncommon ornament, often a painted, dyed, embroidered, or sewn image - usually on the large panels that make up the back and front of the jackets, but occasionally also running down the sleeves. Images vary, but are generally iconic or religious in flavour: the combination of blood-red sea and sun is very common, as are chaos scenes and elaborate sacred timelines. This practice is often thought to be a cultural offshoot of the image game of the Imperial territories, but the Baronials will insist that its roots are indigenous. 10s. 
• 8: Pearls. Pearls are a common and expensive ornament, and usually sewn into the fabric in regular patterns and 'nets'. The seas of the Barony (and particularly around the Lantern berth) produce the best pearls in the world, and they are famously of many different colours. White pearls signify wealth, red pearls sexual potency, black pearls academic learning, blue and purple pearls personal combat prowess, and yellow pearls piousness. Dream pearls are only fished from the islands, and shift their colours under the eye. Roll a d6 to determine which this jacket is sewn with. Adds 50s in value, or 100s if the buyer identifies with the specific colour of pearls. Dream pearls always add 100s due to their rarity, and if worn while sleeping they will always show up on your clothing in the Dreamlands, and grant you a +1 on reactions rolled there. 
• 9: Thread-of-Gold. Worked with gold (or much more commonly, gold-alloy) wiring. In good taste, this is distributed across the whole surface of the fabric such that it takes on a subtly different sheen and colour, but brash sorts enjoy concentrating it into whole panels or graphic sections of gold. 75s. 
• 10: Gem-Work. Baronials love gems and love jewellery, and find whatever excuse they can to incorporate them into their material culture. Jackets are no exception. Large gems are typically concentrated at the throat and wrists, and smaller stones sewn in patterned 'nets' across broad sections of fabric. Most Baronials will have their favourite hues, cuts, and combinations. Roll 3d6x10 to determine the value of those sewn into this particular piece.  

Pictorial Wargames - Citizen of the White City Redux

Many moons ago I wrote a class for the the Citizens of the terrible imperial metropole. This was in the very early days of the blog, and many things have since changed. I was never really happy with it - it ended up being a sort of downtime class that could nebulously 'infect' populations with ideas and concepts. Not a terrible idea for a class, but a bit blunt and brute-force and crude. 

I wrote a while ago about optical wargames, which depend on the machine/interface relation to produce a play space composed by sensors, registering marks, spoofing tech, etc.; a literally or infinitely 'artificial' space, layered atop the one that the characters physically navigate with their bodies. 

A pictorial wargame operates under superficially similar principles - it introduces an abstracting/artificial strata over the embodied space where the game usually takes place. Unfortunately, the image/relation diagram is much trickier to build out than that of the machine/interface - where the interface aims to produce clarity from obscure processes, the relation introduces layered interpretations into previously distinct categories. The class is an attempt in this direction. A debt is owed to Grek's very great Psychic. 

This is also technically a Glaugust post: a class that is absolutely not a Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, or Thief (I cheated a bit in that this class is also NOT short lmao). 

Class: Citizen of the White City

Introduce an image, then introduce a relation. The image is anything-whatever; the relation is the thing that you tie to your soul. 

Gear: a heavy spear, a heavy arbalest, a light stamped-steel misericorde, light fabric amour, two detailed and accurate maps of your starter region, one topographic, one Special (roll on the list below), d3 Intelligence Reports.  

Skills: none that are useable outside the White City - while in the City, you have an innate and unselfconscious sense for the million shibboleths required to be recognised and accepted as a native of that place. In addition, your militia training has given you proficiency with spears, crossbows, knives, and the digging and maintenance of earthworks, tunnels, and fortifications. 

A: The Machinery of the Eye
B: Postures of Critique
C: The Place of Abomination
D: A Prototype

Angels, demons, and entities hate and fear you as a baseline.

The inhabitants of Dream find it difficult to think of you in neutral terms: treat their reaction rolls of 2 - 7 as a 2, and rolls of of 8 - 12 as a 12. No matter what their reaction to you is, they will appear to you as their nightmare variants. 

The Machinery of the Eye

Every person that you meet has a Mind. Unlike other people, you can both perceive the Mind and interact with it. The interface that you use to do this is complicated and intuitive, but it can be (crudely) represented spatially. 

This means that every NPC you meet can have their mind represented by a small dungeon-like space, which you can interact with. Expect your DM to veto this class if the campaign they are running is not the type that is interested in things like every NPC's mind being represented by a dungeon space. 

A Mind will be more or less complex depending on its host's mental alacrity, imaginative power, and self-awareness. In practice, the Mind will feature [derived INT bonus +1, minimum 1] +[derived WIS bonus +1, minimum 1] + [derived CHAR bonus +1, minimum 1] rooms, plus an additional +1 room for every HD they possess.

These rooms will always be connected to one another directly, and you should also mark which specific rooms are derived from mental stats (INT, WIS, and CAR), and which are generated from HD. All rooms and corridors are nondescript, colourless, evenly lit, and empty. Rooms derived from mental stats are 20ft x 20ft, rooms derived from HD are 30ft x 30ft. 

Other PCs also have Minds, but interacting with them is analogous to PVP play, and you should check in with both the DM and other players before doing so. If necessary, the DM will design Minds for other PCs in conversation with them. 

People who have grown up in the White City or otherwise have a facility with its strange culture have twice as many rooms in their Minds as normal. You might also find ancient or inhuman Minds with impossible or actively hostile architectures of various kinds. 

To interact with a Mind at all, someone must enter into unguarded conversation with you for at least an hour. This could be while marching, in downtime, by a campfire, in the prince's audience chambers, whatever. Once this contact has been established, you have access to their Mind and can go to work.

You have a pool of 'points' that facilitate this work, and which are initially equal to your templates in this class. You always start with [templates] points in any Mind you gain access to, and additionally gain one point for each of the following:

• You learn what someone is prepared to sacrifice in pursuit of their goals. 
• You learn what those goals are in specific detail. 
• You learn what someone fears most. 
• You learn what that fear might push them to do if they thought there would be no repercussions.
• You learn if they love anything or anyone selflessly. 
• You learn who or what the object of that love is. 
• You learn the extent to which desire rules them. 
• You learn the object of their most powerful desire.

You get your template points with every new Mind that you contact, but additional points are on a case-by-case basis per Mind. Once a point is spent, it is spent forever and can never be recovered. Once a change has been implemented in a Mind, it is permanent, and can only be reversed or removed by spending its cost in points a second time.

Using a single point you can:

• Instantiate yourself as an avatar in the mind. This is in a fixed location, with a fixed 90 degree line of sight. In a mind you can see forever, providing that what you are looking at is lit. If you wish to 'move' inside a mind, or change your angle of view, you must do so by spending an additional point. 
  
• Change a single wall of any length perfectly transparent or perfectly reflective.
• Instantiate an image in the mind. This is 'drawn' onto a surface wall, and takes up an area 10ft x 10ft. If you wish to remove or move you must do so by spending an additional point. Images that you can 'see' inside the mind, from the POV of your instantiated avatar, have various effects, which are elaborated further on in this most. Most of your class abilities rely on 'seeing' multiple images at a time from your avatar's fixed POV. An image on a transparent wall can be seen, but seeing two images 'layered' over the top of one another destroyed the ability to see either. 

If your instantiated avatar can 'see' more than one image at the same time, then the Citizen of the White City can choose to make the two images alike, not alike, equivalent, mutually exclusive, opposed, or complimentary, in the view of the person whose Mind you are working in. Establishing a relation this way costs a point, and players are encouraged to come up with their own relations and suggest them to the DM. 

This process can lead to serious personality changes and the working through of violent contradictions. The DM is encouraged to give a Citizen broad leeway when interpreting images for this purpose: a sunrise might stand in for a birth, a night sky for death, a rose for repetition, a face for a specific face, and so on. Any changes will occur to the affected party as though they were the natural and reasonable products of their own thinking. 

Inside the mind, the instantiated avatar is itself an image, provided that it can see itself. It is always an image of the subject whose Mind you are working on, or of you yourself, the Citizen, and is the only image that can be interpreted as either of these two things. As a general rule, the avatar cannot see itself without mechanical assistance (by mirrors etc.). 

In addition, specific rooms marked with images have the following effects: 

• If the room corresponds to a mental stat, the Citizen of the White City can declare before the roll that a check or save made using that stat is +/- x, where x is the number of rooms marked with images. If ALL of the rooms that correspond to a given mental stat are marked with images, and all these images can be 'seen' by the avatar, then the Citizen of the White City may instead choose whether the test is passed or failed, with no roll necessary.
• If the room corresponds to an HD, the Citizen of the White City may choose for that HD not to apply during combat. They can choose to do this when the combat is first joined, or when the effected person first takes damage, and HP will immediately rerolled at that moment (in rare cases this may result in more hp being rolled, which is intended). The person will feel something wrong, but will not know that the Citizen is responsible. 

Note that the avatar itself does not move, change its POV, or meaningfully navigate the Mind that it is placed in. Every point spent in the process of working on a Mind changes a fixed set of spatial relations within that Mind - it can and should be represented by a diagram, which the player will be responsible for producing, which can be referred back to if in doubt of any particular effect, and which will need to be redrawn should another point be spent. 

Postures of Critique

You may now spend a point to create a mirrored plane of any dimensions that you wish inside a Mind that you are working on. It reflects light perfectly. 

In addition, you have +templates to to-hit and damage rolls against anyone with a visible image of you inside their Mind.

The Place of Abomination

You now gain a new point each morning for every Mind hosted by someone who trusts you. This point is lost if not spent before the next is generated from this template. 

You may now spend a point to create a magic lantern - a machine that projects an image in a 90 degree cone and displays it on the first wall it hits. The room hosting the lantern counts as holding the image it projects, regardless of where the image actually lands. 

If your avatar can see an image of you, and of the host of the Mind being worked on, you can choose to permanently sever any connection that they have to entities of any kind. 

A Prototype

You can choose to give your avatars 360 degree vision or to turn all walls in all of your Minds transparent. You make this choice once, when you receive your D template, and it applies in perpetuity. 

You can choose to become invisible or inaudible to anyone with a visible image of you inside their Mind.

Humans and other sentient beings capable of feeling fear must test CHAR to strike you in melee. 

Special Gear

Intelligence Reports

For each report, ask your DM a question about the area that you find yourself in. They will give you a truthful answer, such as would be known by a well-informed local. You must spend all Intelligence Reports on campaign start, you cannot 'bank' them. Just say NO to unmarked packages. 

Special Maps

I addition to your topographic map, you have (roll a d10):

1. A map of the local waterways, wells, and faults that give access to the water table. 
2. A map of marked with local population densities, fertility, and life expectancy. 
3. A map of local petroleum deposits beneath the earth.
4. A detailed and accurate map of local military forces and political alliances.
5. A map that marks all local productive farmland. 
6. A map of local weather patterns, notated to cover the whole year. 
7. A map of food distribution hubs and logistics chains.
8. A map that marks the names and locations of the 20 most influential people in the area.
9. A map that marks the locations of all local concentrations of monetary wealth above 5000s.  
10. A Pragmatist's Map, a strange, swirling constellation of diagrams tracking flows and state-changes that are largely illegible to you, non-specialist that you are. When you study it it reminds you of home - if you do this for an hour, you heal 1 fear damage.