Dungeon Set Pieces: The Mimic Hell

I'm slowly pulling together my first properly large and complex dungeon as a sort of capstone to the Barony content that I've been collecting recently. The basic layout is here, and I currently thinking about building it out around several major set pieces.

The first of these, found in the dungeon strata, is the Mimic Hell, a torture room built by one of the demons that King Magda had imprisoned beneath his tower. Others upcoming are the Tombs of the Serpent Men, The White Ape Monastery, and the Sanctum of the Law-Eaters, but all things in their place and a time for everything under the sun. 

The Mimic Hell acts as the 'boss' for the first level of the dungeon. 

A bit about Mimic Hells here; basically they are something that some demons build compulsively to try to bring a tiny portion of the horror of the Material Hell into existence in the present. Their existence is a fireside horror story for most adventurers, and they are infamously cruel, trap-infested, lethal, and devoid of treasure.

This one has been hastily constructed over a couple of days, by the demon Misery, with the help of the band of thieves who have entered into its service. It is a crude maze of cheap, rotted timber boards, nailed together haphazardly, and of poor enough construction that the 'walls' don't actually prevent a determined person from passing - they can be knocked down, punched through, or pried apart without much issue.

The twisting corridors are extremely narrow, and the whole space is poorly lit in blood red by lanterns whose glass apertures have been painted with the gore of butchered Starlings.

Almost every corridor is crudely trapped. Nothing tricky or mechanical, this will mostly be punji stakes on the walls and floors, torn and jagged metal, broken glass on the floor, false surfaces that fall away, shit and oil smeared over things to make them poisonous, and possibly a few simple, torsioned pop-up spikes around the place. It should read less Indiana Jones and more SAW, Silent Hill, The Valley of Defilement.

There are also Evil Mirrors installed throughout the maze. The reflective surfaces have been transformed into extensions of the insane will of the demon, and give false images that confuse and demoralise those trying to navigate the space. 

Finally, two Chaos Eaters patrol the corridors and attack all that they find. 

There is no treasure in the Mimic Hell, but Misery has built it on top of the entrance to the next level, so adventurers who wish to proceed will need to navigate it to do so. Misery itself sits in the centre in the stolen and mutilated body of a Starling corporal, taunting and screaming and laughing at the PCs as they struggle through the gauntlet.

Like this

And this

In game:

The corridors are 5ft wide and open at the top, with some that are 2.5ft wide. 

The whole edifice smells of sewage, rust, and blood. The light in the maze is low and blood red, shifting shadows, jagged, backlit shapes, and bad reflections. 

The Maze:

It is not actually solvable (all routes lead into dead ends), but it will take a good amount of exploration to realise this. The broad idea is that the PCs are slowly breaking their way through this horrible environment, possibly split up (because the ways are narrow), hunted by the Chaos Eaters, and under mental attack by Misery at the centre. It's designed to feel worse/more dangerous than it actually is - Misery and the Chaos Eaters are the only serious threat in the place, and it is vulnerable to Gordian Knot solutions like acrobat-ing around above the corridors, or just burning the fucking thing down. Attrition over time is a major theme. 

Any wall can be torn down with an easy STR check. This will make noise, and may trigger traps or expose you to damage; see below. 

Traps: 

Many false surfaces designed to give way into pits of stakes and jagged metal. Save, or take d4 piercing damage.

Many walls are festooned with spikes. If you try to tear one of these down, you must save DEX or take d3 piercing damage. You can only save for this damage if the spikes are on the side of the wall that you can see. 

Broken glass is scattered across the floor throughout the maze. It has no effect on an adventurer with boots on, but if someone falls on it (or if they are grappled on it) they take d2 damage. Heavy armour wearers ignore this damage entirely. 

Some sections of the labyrinth feature caltrops and other pieces of twisted, sharpened metal scattered across the floor. These work through boots. An adventurer can traverse the area safely by moving at half speed, but if they choose to move faster, fall over, or are grappled on the surface, they take d3 damage. Heavy armour wearers reduce this damage to 1. 

Trip wires trigger noise-makers, or simple torsion traps. Noise makers will draw the Chaos-Eaters. Torsion traps can be avoided with a DEX save, otherwise they deal d6 damage.  

Taking piercing or slashing damage from any of the traps in the Mimic Hell forces a CON save - on a failure the wound is infected and pre-septic. All death and dismemberment rolls count as one worse until you can get treatment, and this penalty stacks with further failed saves. 

Mirrors:

There are four Evil Mirrors in the maze. If you can see your reflection in them, Misery can see you and target you with its magic. They also give you a bad reflection; things happen slightly too early or too late, expressions are wrong; there are flashes of you and your companions dead; all the normal spooky mirror stuff. If you can see your reflection in them, your roll to hit at -1, and take +1 fear damage from all sources. 

If Misery can see you in its mirrors, it can direct the Chaos Eaters to attack you at its leisure. Misery is intelligent, and will generally do this at the worst possible time. It will also enjoy setting both on you at once.

Demons are notoriously confused and fearful in the presence of mundane mirrors, and they sometimes build Evil Mirrors (with methods unknown) to inflict that same confusion and horror on humans. It is conjectured that the petty disorder shown in the glass is 'natural' to the minds of demons, as the perfect reflections of our mirrors are broadly 'natural' to us. 

Dead Starlings:

About 15 of them scattered through the maze, obviously killed by traps or torn up by the Chaos Eaters. A few of them have clearly ended their own lives by falling on swords or cutting their own throats. Many of the corpses have their bowels cut open to furnish the traps around them with filth. 

The bodies have good quality weapons on them, but the armour is damaged beyond use. One was carrying the Starling's standard, which is dirty and bloodstained but still intact. This will be worth money to the Baronial Agents at the surface, and its recovery will put any surviving Starlings in your service. 

Chaos Eaters:

Each turn that PCs spend in the Mirror Hell, roll a d10. +1 if they are in heavy armour, +2 if they are pulling down walls, +10 if they trigger a noisemaker. On a 10 or more, one of the Chaos Eaters has found you - it attacks with surprise, bursting through a wall or out of the floor. On a 15 or more, both find you at the same time (provided that they are both still alive). 

Chaos Eaters are giant (maybe 9 feet long) centipede-like vermin. Some are actually centipedes, some look like fluke worms, flat worms, millipedes, etc. They all have horrible circular mouths ringed with grinding teeth.

They have HD4, attack for d10, armour as chain, speed as a horse, disposition of ambush predators. If they hit you with their attack they will get a free grapple attempt with their long, sinuous body. If they crit you while you are grappled, they deal triple damage instead of double, as their grinding teeth attach to a limb or head and get to work. 

Chaos Eaters are beings of Law, grown in their squirming billions in the future and then seeded back through the timeline to prune it of its complexities. When they attack you, you are cursed for the remainder of the combat - any hit and damage rolls above the dice average count as -1, which stacks each time you are cursed. You don't get a corresponding +1 for low rolls; this is a curse, and Law can be evenly distributed once the cosmic battle is won. 

Misery:

Misery has possessed the dead and mutilated body of a Starling, and sits at the heart of the Mimic Hell, guarding the passage to the Underworld. It screams constantly and horribly. Misery will not move until it is actually discovered by one of the PCs, in which event it will try to kill them using the Starling's body. It prefers mental attacks to physical ones. 

If Misery can see you, it will try to force its way into your mind and leave splinters of its own horrible intelligence in there. This magical attack works through Evil Mirrors and by normal POV. PCs can save CHAR to avoid, but they save with disadvantage if they can hear the demon screaming. It does d4 psychic damage, and gives an 1 in 6 chance that Misery controls the actions of this PC next turn, which goes up by one with each previous failure. Misery cannot truly reproduce itself this way, it can only puppet multiple bodies - there is still only a single mind.

The body that Misery puppets is a Starling veteran, HD1, clad in chain and holding a long steel needle in each hand. It is banged up/mutilated already, and has 4 HP. The needles are traditional/ceremonial weapons for demons, and not especially practical when wielded by humans - they hit for d4 and their awkwardness means that they have -1 to hit. It will drop when reduced to 0 HP, but the pieces of the body will continue to move and animate. They are incapable of attacking in this state. 

Misery itself is HD6, disposition as torturer, cannot be attacked in the normal ways. It has 10 HP (which represent its mental hold on its own instantiation), and can be damaged in the following ways:

• Reducing the HP the body of the Starling soldier it has inhabited to 0: -1 HP
• Spending a turn pounding or stomping the writhing pieces of the body into slurry (you hit automatically): -1 HP.
• Pour holy water on the corpse that it puppets (only works once): -3 HP
• Spend a round forcing it to look at its own reflection in a mundane mirror: -3 HP
• Spend a round screaming at it from 5 ft away, louder than it screams. This will require at least three people, because Misery can scream really loudly. -4 HP

Misery will regenerate 1 HP per turn that it does not take damage. 

Basically you need to give it a bad enough panic attack that it can no longer keep its mind together. The idea is that you CAN do this by just wailing on it, but this is not efficient, and you will be vulnerable to its possession attacks the whole time. The specific weaknesses can be discovered in King Mag's library on the surface, but all adventurers know that demons hate mirrors and holy water. 

Once Misery is brought to 0 HP, it will have been rendered permanently incapable of coherent thought, and thus incapable of action. It will be as though it were gone forever. 

Side note: all angels and demons are banished by giving them sensory overloads/schizophrenia/enough depression that they no longer wish to act. They are intelligences after all. Individuals entities have different things that trigger them. They are also unable to act against the letter of a contract, in the classical way. 

Steward Subclass

Before the subclass, some setting notes:

A Steward is a type of personal servant, someone with a close, dedicated, domestic relationship with a single employer. The role is historically specific, and societally important in the Barony. Stewards were originally a formal part of older chivalric/feudal militaries, but the role has transitioned into something roughly analogous to a valet and bodyguard. 

Stewards accompany their employers day to day, and are often close advisers in business and personal matters. They are also responsible for cooking meals, and maintaining their employers' makeup, clothing, and personal grooming. The are trained centrally in schools, and these schools have reputations; when you hire a Steward, you can be rest assured that you know what it is you're hiring.

Stewards also have a kind of mythic or folkloric stature with the adventurers of the Barony. Adventurers live and die in the blackest holes, and do battle with monsters and nightmares. To them, someone who will cook, clean, shave, and shine their boots each morning, even in the forgotten oubliettes of the Underworld, is like a blazing beacon or a warm and comforting fire. They represent human-ness in places of deep inhumanity: 'You don't shave to look pretty, sir, you shave to show the brutes who we are.' Stewards are human supremacists; they believe in the glories of order and civilisation, made manifest in its many rituals. They carry soap, lather, spices, sweetmeats, and perfume down with them into the darkness. 

There is also an institutional tradition that the Stewards have developed over the decades, their most famous and most celebrated. They cook and eat monsters. The profound effect that this has on the morale of fellow adventurers has been the subject of years of inconclusive studies by the Academics. Any adventurer with any experience at all has seen their comrades taken by the things that live beyond the light of civilisation, and often they have watched friends skinned and jointed, or simply devoured whole by those same monsters. The sound of a Steward sharpening their long boning knives and chuckling as they get to work dressing a freshly slain carcass, or casually listing the coming cuts of meat as they prepare to fight a still living meal, acts like a spell on the fearful mind.

The Stewards themselves are fanatics. They know that the days of the Underworld are finite. They believe in the transcendent order of Law - not of specific laws, but of Law. They know, perhaps even better than the priesthood, what rituals mean, and how they can save us. They cannot explain these things to you; all they can tell you is that being saved is easy: you just need to eat well, get your exercise in, keep up standards, and avoid scandal and association with riffraff. Everything else will fall into place. 

Design Note: Barony assumes that HP represents a mixture of bodily integrity, morale, well rested-ness, a full belly, and esprit de corps; the Heroic Poise model in Arnold K's post here. It also assumes a greater than usual prevalence of fear damage in the dungeon. 

Like this

STEWARD

'Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.'

'

Starting Skills: Formal Etiquette, Professional Grooming, Cooking, Medicine

Starting Gear: Formal attire, cooking gear, shaving kit, 5 doses of cosmetics. 

Choose another member of the party to be your Master. This contract will last until your death or theirs, and if they die first then you may enter the employ of another. 

A Bodyguard, Inspection, Hotpot
B Avatar, The Cure

Bodyguard: When your Master takes damage, you may interpose yourself between them and the source of the hit, taking it for them. You can do this once per turn, and must reasonably be in a position to get in the way of the blow. While your Master is still alive, you are completely immune to fear damage. 

Inspection: While the party is resting, you can spend time inspecting the clothes and comportment of your companions. Inspecting your master takes 30 mins, and inspecting another member of the party takes 10 (you must always see to your master before moving on to others). You clean, shine, buff, and adjust, making approving noises the while. Anyone seen to in this way heals 1 HP and 1 fear damage. If you expend a dose of cosmetics, this goes up to d4. Your Master gets +1 to all of these numbers.

Hotpot: You may take ingredients from any monster corpses that you or your party have slain. Once a day, while resting, you may cook a meal if you have the makings for one, and include the ingredients you have collected so far. This takes an hour to prepare. Anyone in the party who eats the meal will, for the rest of the day, be immune to fear damage dealt by the monsters who have been cooked into the meal. 

Avatar: All of this filth will be washed away. The dark places of the world will be razed, and then prepared again in the likeness of people like you. 3 times per day, you can force a monster with 2HD or less to check morale when you attack them in melee. This check is made at -1 if your clothes are clean and well presented. You are immune to fear damage, whether or not your Master is alive.

The Cure: You can prepare another type of special meal during a rest. If a party member is diseased, you can prepare a curative for them, using the flesh of their body to do so. The party member must take a permanent -1 to STR, DEX, or CON (your choice), as a small digit or choice section of muscle and fat is cut away. The meal takes an hour to prepare, and counts as a single dose of Curatives. It also heals d6+1 HP. If preparing The Cure for your Master, you may choose to take the statistic penalty instead. 

The Salt Star

In the Barony, and in the world at large, there is a disease that everyone gets at some point their life, and most people get more than once. It's called the Salt Sickness, and no one now remember how it got its name. The symptoms are mild, something like a flu with a high fever, and it is about as contagious as a common cold. Unlike most disease in the Barony, contracting the Salt Sickness is not a big deal.

Each time that you contract this disease, you move a little further into a dreamlike state. Most people get it every 20 years or so; some people more; some people never get it. The long term effects are heightened pattern recognition, periods of gentle mania, and increasingly vivid dreams. These symptoms progress further each time that you catch the disease, and the population of the Barony will sometimes talk of 'generations' of the illness. Her behaviour is understandable, she's already four generations deep. 

In already sensitive people, a couple of generations into the Salt Sickness can start to look like schizophrenia. For most, it is assumed that older people (since they are likely to have more generations under their belts) will have a more vibrant and active imagination, and a better capacity for image-thought and complex ideation. 

Each time the disease draws further you into the dream, you will perceive a special star in the sky, called the Slat Star, more brightly. The Salt Star is invisible to people who have never caught the illness. Those rare individuals who go fifteen or twenty generations deep will tell you that eventually the Salt Star burns brightly enough in the sky to obscure every other constellation, but people that deep in say many things, many of them impossible. 

All the normal preventative measures that you would take against flu work against the Salt Sickness. 

In game terms:

Symptoms are not severe enough to effect your character's stat sheet. The disease lasts about a week. 

Each year, there is a 1/20 chance that you will contract the illness. The DM will determine when in the year. 

You can catch it from someone else who has it, and all the normal drugs work. The effects only take place if the disease runs its course without the character taking curatives, which will immediately banish the symptoms. 

After the disease has run its course, you lose 1 INT or WIS (roll), and gain 1 CHAR. The change is permanent, and stacks over the course of your life. 

Entities - Third Pass

The Barony setting document I put up a couple of days ago is built around a set of 11 classes, and two of them, the Academic and the Artist, significantly make use of a new magic system based around language and magical beings called entities. I wanted to make some actual rules for using these, to reduce the work for the DM in running a game with these classes.  

This is probably not how I would use them; in my own game I prefer things like magic and magical contracts to be less clearly systematised; but I think it's important to give the option for games with an expectation of a properly systematic DnD-style magic system.

• Entities are statted NPCs without any physical stats. 
• All entities are incorporeal (this is a slight retcon for simplification around possession rules). 
• Entities can be as intelligent as: a dog, a crow, a human child, an adult human, a very smart human adult.
• Entities who have at least human level intelligence will speak their own pattern language.
• Entities know magic, and cast with MD like a GLOG wizard. Entities of low intelligence probably know a single spell, entities of high intelligence know spells like a normal GLOG wizard. The player will only have access to these spells through favours, so more spells does not mean more casts - it usually means greater flexibility. 
• Entities can possess human bodies. The human can be willing (many class features revolve around this), or it can be done on an unwilling target. On an unwilling target, make an opposed Char check. The unwilling human may then save twice more on subsequent turns, and if all three tests are failed then the entity is in control until it decides to leave (or until the host is force-fed stimulants).
• Humans possessed by entities can cast the entity's magic, and take a level of exhaustion and 1 point of damage every time the entity possessing them rolls a 4-6 on its MD. If the host's inventory is maxed out with exhaustion, the damage goes up to d3. An entity can also choose to roll a 6 on their MD at the cost of d6 damage to the host. Human bodies are not meant to perform magic. There are many entities that will callously kill humans this way. 
• Humans possessed by entities also do not feel pain, or fear of anything that will only harm the human body. 

Casting magic with your entity!

• Entities can enter into a relationship with you if you speak their language. To communicate at all you must at minimum speak the same metalanguage. If an entity speaks their own pattern language (not a metalanguage), taking the time to learn that language will mean that they like you as a default.
• Entities can be called using their names. Entities who like you will come when you call. Make a Char check with an appropriate penalty (based on how powerful and prideful the thing you're trying to summon is) if you try to summon something without a preexisting relationship. Entities can also be trapped in various ways - they cannot answer a summons if trapped. 
• An entity who likes you will do you one favour a day for free, as long as the relationship does not sour. Entities do not distinguish between magic and mundane favours. 
• You can try to convince an entity to stick around and provide you more favours. This will always require payment of some kind. Entities like different things, and will take all of the classical mystical currencies (years of life, firstborns, etc.) in addition to blood, sugar, iron, gold, memories, youth, health, beauty.

Notes on artist entities!

• Artists are in permanent contact with their entity, and are assumed to have its unconditional love and support. They also get full access to their entity's magic permanently when they get their B template. 
• This means that at a certain point artists will be casting with MD like a normal GLOG magic user. 
• In my own games I probably would not give artist entities access to direct damage spells. In my mind they would have perception and sensitivity based magic, things like true seeing, protection from Law and Chaos, charm, illusion, etc. etc. 
• I would also limit the power of artist entities relative to the ones in the wild that Academics speak to and bargain with. You could make this a result of the relative youth of artist entities, who only came into the world when their artist did. 
• They would also probably have the ability to forge/create artefacts of various kinds (I could see a summonable Blade of Intention with a blade cut away from the fabric of the world, a sort of painter-hexblade). 
• YMMV, maybe you want your warlock artists casting fireballs. 

That seems functional enough? Any and all feedback gratefully received. 

The Apparition, by the very great Gustave Moreau.

Undead/Angels

Undead

Undead in the Barony are relatively rare, but, since they cannot be killed or easily destroyed, the population tends to grow slowly over time.

All undead (and all undead are physical - ghosts are something else) are created the same way. One of God's gifts to humans was its angels; beings who all have the ability to raise a body from the dead. This is actually how the academics define 'Angel' - they are the entities that are capable of raising the dead. If the body is clean, whole, and otherwise a good house for the soul, and the soul can be located and returned to the body, this is a resurrection of someone who should have died.

If, however, any of these conditions are not met, then the body remains animate but soulless. A body raised by an angel will never rest, until it literally decays to nothingness. It will start off as a confused (and probably maimed) human who does not need to sleep, breath, or eat, and will rot over time until it becomes a zombie, and then a skeleton, and then dust.

It is extremely rare for God to raise a body for the purposes of saving a soul and returning someone to life. When it does so the reasons are inscrutable, and it typically demands a heavy payment for the service. Angels will more often raise bodies for other reasons - often manual labour in the service of the church, or sometimes for quick standing armies. Because these bodies will never rest, they are often rounded up afterwards and burned, ground down, dissolved in acid, etc. etc. The church is politically motivated to keep the popular image of undead threatening and othered; most people think of zombies and skeletons as insane cannibal things. The reality tends to be more complicated.

Undead are generally more impulsive and aggressive than humans animated by their soul. There is debate as to whether this is something intrinsic to their unnatural being, or whether it is a result of discrimination, zero legal recourse, and the constant looming threat of being unmade. They can talk and think like anyone else. There is debate about whether the act of resurrection consists in the unseating of the intelligence from the brain (and also disconnecting it from its material dependencies), and instead binding it to the whole of the body. Zombie hands crawl, zombie heads bite, zombie intestines strangle. All of them are animated by the first and fundamental intelligence of God. This intelligence in its localised state seems to get more complex as the body it is tied to grows in mass.

The undead have a culture. Because they have no legal protection, they often attach themselves to existent institutions to escape persecution and material destruction. There are many undead in the service of the church, as labourers, scribes, and soldiers, and those who perform well and loyally are given access to preserving oils and chemicals to lengthen their 'lives'. They can be bought and sold as property, and most organisations can find uses for thinking beings who do not sleep or need sustenance of any kind.

There are, naturally, also undead who organise against slavery and arbitrary destruction, and who become bandits, freedom fighters, hedge knights, or wanderers. For all undead the trade in preservatives for the body is a keen focus. For many, buying or taking the freedom of other undead is their primary motivation.

As a byproduct of God's instantiation inside their bodies, all undead speak Enochian, and can do so without functioning organs for speaking or breathing. Since many undead loathe the church, they also use their own secret language of hand signs and gestures. Being caught using this by the church is grounds for summary material destruction.

-

Angels

Angels are God's instruments in the world. They were created after humans, and all angels hold a sour understanding of their secondness in God's design. They are incorporeal, voiced, intelligent, and imaginative - they are actually materially almost indistinguishable from demons, and both can possess human and human-like forms to get more done in the world. Demons, however, cannot raise the dead.

Angels are in direct, often mundane contact with the church and its leaders. They make demands and give tasks and missions to their human collaborators. They can communicate with God directly, but only under the open sky (not indoors or underground, not too much cloud cover, etc.). All churches and most middle and upper class homes will have an 'angel room' - a type of furnished courtyard at the centre of the floorplan, where the presence of God is felt to be strongest.

Angels are associated with vision, and clarity of sight (as demons are associated with touch, taste, and smell). They can see through walls, bodies, falsehoods, good intentions. If you found a way to blind an angel it would be like killing it. 

Warrior and logistics angels are the most numerous in the Barony. Logistics angels rarely take on physical puppet-form, and when they do they are often crude, twiggy, lashed-together things built to hold pens or turn pages. They also rarely have the willpower to directly control a human body.

Warrior angels often demand bodies from the church - generally these are solid iron (or wooden, depending on the wealth of the particular church community) mannikins carved with great reverence into beautified human forms. They breath solar fire, often float a few feet above the ground, and kill the things that God tells them to. The bodies can be physically destroyed, but the angel will not be harmed by this. 

Angels can be dealt with like demons can - they are logical beings who you can trap in language or in contracts, and they get scared easily when cut away form their divine connection. Many adventurers who have come into contact with angels have noted, over time, a strange childishness or insecurity about them, which only becomes more pronounced the further they stray from their creator. 

Angels are also known to become stranger with age. It is not known how or why God chooses to make or destroy angels, but the church is aware that this turnaround happens fairly quickly. No one knows what happens to the angels 'turned around' this way. The new arrivals tend to be eager to please, full of can-do attitude, and slightly naive about the world. Those that do become old are deeply inhuman things of awesome and frightening power. They speak as bells speak, the remake the world in accordance with their strictly arranged vision. They have thousands of arms and thousands of eyes and thousands of heads and thousands of minds. The puppets that they commission when they walk our world are monstrous things as big as buildings. And sometimes they scream for days and weeks and cannot or will not explain why. 

Part One - The Surface

The Surface

Magda's Needle is a well known landmark, and a site of dark rumour.

King Magda is a regional noble (Kings and Queens rank below the Baron), and has a reputation as a sorcerer and a madman. He is neither - he is a sage, and an experimenter, and has used the squat stone tower to summon, imprison, and interrogate demons of various kinds for many years. He has also used the sprawling subterranean cells to imprison bandits, poachers, and political prisoners. The Needle is greatly feared by those who live in his lands. 

Magda recently entered the tower and failed to emerge. Most assumed that he was murdered by the demons that he dealt with and spoke to, and not many mourned. All was quiet in the prison. Then the Starlings, a famous troupe of veteran mercenaries in the employ of the Church, forced entry into the catacombs below, with the aim of killing the demon-possessed prisoners and cleansing the place of evil. That was four days ago, and none of the company returned.

The Sainted Captain of the Starlings was a canonised war saint, and had holy relics from the capital in their possession. To show good faith to the church, the Baroness has promised a substantial reward to any who can bring the relics back to the surface, and report on the fate of the Starlings. She has also sent two Baronial Agents, and a levy of spearmen and arbalesters from the capital, to set up a cordon around the structure and prevent the escape of anything within.

When you and your companions arrive it is dusk, and the light is quickly leaving the sky. The dark bulk of the tower stands in relief against a sky of grey clouds that glow with the last sun. The camp of the Agents is well organised, and lit with brightly flaring torches. The levy troops are grim men and women and they eye you warily as you approach, but they agree to present you to the Agents to make yourselves, and your intentions, known.

The Camp

The camp is inhabited by two Baronial Agents, Rosemary and Charlie, 16 spearmen, and 12 arbalesters. They have erected 4 tents for the enlisted men, who guard the site on 12 hour shifts. They watch the interior entrance to the prison for anything emerging from below, patrol a close perimeter around the site, and guard the second floor entrance to Magda's private rooms, study, and library. To show confidence to the men, Rose and Charlie have set up their own table and quarters inside the ground floor store rooms of the tower itself, so they are always on hand if there is any movement from within. There are alarms (gongs and beaters) in the camp and at each guard post, and they are also carried by patrols - these will immediately be sounded if any of the guards are under threat, and will wake everyone in the camp.

Rose and Charlie are experienced agents and not friendly people. They were their bright red armour at all times, and neither of them sleeps much. Rose is a Specialist 2/Fighter 1 armed with a parrying knife, and Charlie is a Fighter 3 with a sword and shield. Charlie wears a harlequin half cloak to hide the movement of his sword arm, an affectation that marks him out as an ex gang bravo. Rose wears expensive steel spectacles. Both are in their mid twenties. All of the enlisted men and women are men-at-arms, armed with swords, spears, and shields, or swords and arbalests, according to their role. They all wear good-quality chain. No one out here will give even a first warning before killing you if they think you are dangerous. As far as this contingent is concerned, they are currently on campaign in what amounts to enemy territory. 

Also parked inside the camp perimeter is a large, armoured wagon, painted with holy scenes and hitched to a team of barded horses of excellent quality. If you ask, you will be told that it belonged to the Starlings and their Sainted Captain.

Rose and Charlie will be brief with you, but they are trustworthy and reliable. They will not venture down into the prison themselves, but will not stop you from doing so if you are determined to do so. The library upstairs is off limits. The only information that they have about what might be contained within is a prisoners manifest, which reads as follows:

• The demon Misery. 
• The unnamed demon of song.
• The unnamed demon of profanity and filth. 
• 15 Chaos Eaters. 
• 42 Dimensional Vermin.
• 22 condemned souls, criminals, perverts, hypocrites; human waste. 

They will give you this information freely, and will reaffirm the commitment of the Baroness to reward those that return the holy relics in the possession of the Sainted Captain. They don't know what a 'Chaos Eater' or a 'Dimensional Vermin' is, but their best guess is that these are probably lesser demons of some kind. 

Rose and Charlie are professional, curt, and aloof, but if you get friendly with the levies they will tell you various dark rumours that surround the tower:

• There is a Mimic Hell somewhere below. All adventurers have heard of Mimic Hells and fear them. 
• All of the Starlings are dead or possessed by demons.
• At the lowest level of the dungeon is a gateway to hell.
• A racket of thieves operates from the upper levels of the prison. 
• There is a second entrance to the dungeon, hidden somewhere nearby.
• The things that haunt the corridors below are invisible and intangible.  
• King Mag's undead body can be found the caverns below.

The Tower

The tower itself is made up of a store room at ground level (converted into a checkpoint and war room by the Baronial Agents), and the upper levels, which contain Magda's library and chambers. The entrance is guarded day and night, and you will not be allowed entry, but if you can somehow find your way inside (perhaps via the roof - if you are discovered in this the levy will probably kill you, but may choose instead to beat you within an inch of your life before letting you walk away) you will find the following:

• An extensive library, filled with volumes of demon lore. There are straight forward description of the mechanisms of the Hating Engines and the Material Hell, as well as how demons work, what they want, and how to summon, reason with, or capture them. This might be the single best stocked library on this specialist subject in the world. If you read about the Hating Engines and the Material Hell you have a 50/50 chance of them noticing your interest form the future. If you do so, you thereafter have a 1/100 chance each day (roll on waking) of being attacked by a returner demon, who will attempt to take you back with it to the Material Hell. If you kill five returner demons, then the Hating Engines will not send another, and will come up with something more robust and bespoke to deal with you. 
• Reading through for an hour will give you insight into exactly what Chaos Eaters and Dimensional Vermin are. You have the information on the stat block of these entities, given in the next section. 
• There is a small, mundane lockbox on a side table next to the bed. It contains 22 platinum pieces and two flawless diamonds. There is also a small hand lamp that burns without fuel, and gives off a strange, intense white light. The lamp emits a barely-audible hum, and the light feels uncomfortable on exposed skin. Anything invisible that falls under its light is rendered visible.
• Lying on the bed is what looks like a stuffed fabric puppet of human proportions. It is inanimate, but there are strange slurping and sucking sounds coming from its chest. If the players investigate, they will find a magically-animated trachea, brainstem, pair of lungs, and tongue, sewn into the body of the puppet. 

The store room on the ground level is plain and unornamented. There are timber storage racks at the walls, some of which still contain various dry goods, grains, salted meat, wine, and water. There are two small sealed casks, one filled with holy water and one with petroleum. There are also a good store of torches and pitch, and 20 vials of acid. Rose and Percy will let you take as many torches and rations as you wish, and will sell you acid or holy water at double market rates. They won't sell you petroleum (both are religious), and will get suspicious if you ask them to. 

In the centre of the floor is a short stone stair that leads to a solid iron door. Rose has the key, and will accompany you down to it to unlock it. There is an inscription in common in the stone above the door. It reads:

WE WORK AGAINST THE COMING DAY

Beyond the door, the torchlight illuminates stone stairs that lead down into the earth. It leads to the first level of the dungeon.

Dungeon Notes

UPDATE: See the following for more detailed writeups, maps etc. 

• 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

What follows are a set of extremely rough notes on a dungeon for the Barony setting that I've recently started putting together. I am planning on compiling a bestiary and a lore/fiction document to go with the slim set of player rules already completed, and thought that a dungeon would be a nice way to cap all of that off. 

I have been fascinated recently with the idea of 'ultracore' content - things that are close to archetypal in a dnd setting. With this is mind (and because I was rereading Keep on the Borderlands recently) I thought that trying to write up a descent into a dungeon/underworld/hellscape would be fun and appropriate. Also, I am a Moorcock fan and wanted to have a go at establishing my own Law/Chaos dichotomy in-setting, next to the God/Future Hell Demons axis of conflict, and in what follows (hopefully) one bleeds into the other.  

I would like to make all of this actually useable soon. To start with though, notes:

The Surface

- A tower prison with a sprawling subterranean dungeon. It was used by King Mag, a regional noble obsessed with the occult, to capture and interrogate demons.

- The site is controlled by two Baronial Agents and a levy of fifteen or so local deputies. They are warning people against entering, but will not stop anyone who is determined to do so - they know what adventurers are like. If the party show obvious intent to travel into the complex, they will ask them to watch for any members of the Starlings, a mercenary band who ventured in about four days ago under contract to destroy the demons therein, and have not been heard from since. The captain of the Starlings was a well-known Saint of the Church, who carried holy relics, and considered the cleansing a holy mission. The Starlings (there were 16 of them) travelled with a heavily armoured war wagon, which is parked outside the site. 

- In the top of the tower is a library that used to owned by King Mag, which is under guard and which the BAs and levy will not allow the players to see (BAs have standing orders not to allow any works on magic into the hands of the public). If they do manage to get in and have a look around, they will see that it is a reference library on demons and demon lore. There is enough knowledge here about the Hating Engines, the Material Hell, and travel from the future, that there is a chance that reading it all will put the character at risk of visits from assassin and even returner demons. 

- Also under guard in the library are the physical remains of King Mag, along with a lamp whose strange, harsh white light shows invisible things. Mag has been made into a stuffed fabric puppet, with the original larynx, brain stem, lungs, and tongue still inside. These remains are animate, and make horrible slurping noises. The puppet is otherwise inanimate. 

- There are undead pilgrims who come through the site every now and then. They have told the BAs that there is a holy place at the bottom of the prison (for a long time it was Mag who allowed them access to it), and will not be dissuaded from entering. 

- If the PCs really look like they're going to head down, the BAs will provide them with the prisoner manifest from the prison - 3 demons (one is called Misery, the others do not have recorded names), 15 Chaos Eaters, 42 Dimensional Vermin. There were also 20 or so human prisoners in Mag's dungeons whose fates are uncertain. 

    NOTE - the players won't know this but this dungeon does not repopulate until further in. Mark each kill made in the Dungeon level against the total number listed in the prisoner manifest. After they are all killed, they can no longer be encountered randomly. d6+2 Dimensional Vermin and d6 prisoners have already been killed. 10 of the Starlings have been killed. 

Rumours. The BAs are professionals and won't give out information that is not verified, but the levy with them are not. If you get talking with them they will have heard the following rumours.

• There is a Mimic Hell somewhere below. All adventurers have heard of Mimic Hells and fear them. 
• All of the Starlings are dead or possessed by demons.
• At the lowest level of the dungeon is a gateway to hell.
• A racket of thieves operates from the upper levels. 
• There is a second entrance to the dungeon, hidden somewhere nearby.
• The things that haunt the corridors below are invisible and intangible.  
• King Mag's undead body can be found the caverns below, a pilgrim like the others.

- (could probably get rid of this, there's already a lot going on) Unbeknownst to anyone, there are also four Chemical Courtesans hidden in the region. They want King Mags library, but would prefer to get it without violence if possible. They will wait three days for the BAs to move on, and then if they don't they will poison their supplies. If the site is still inhabited a day after this, they will attempt to slaughter everyone and leave with the books. 

Dungeon (5 levels)

- Evidence of the Starlings fighting the things in the dungeon. Corpses of both sides are strewn about. The bodies of the Starlings look well equipped. The bodies of their enemies are invisible - if they are investigated by touch they will be found to be humanoid. 

- One of the demons that escaped from Mag's prison has built itself a Mimic Hell on this level. The hell is built with crude timber and other materials into several large stone rooms. Think SAW traps in a badly constructed rats nest timber maze - cheap walls, you can easily knock them down or put a fist through them. Lit by red lanterns, and strewn with the remains of more Starlings. The demon Misery sits at the centre screaming and laughing, and two Chaos Eaters patrol the maze. 

- A band of thieves (7 or so people) also live on this level, and have been convinced by the demon to lead adventurers (and the Starlings) into its trap. They then loot the bodies. They have a secret exit/entrance into the dungeon, and the BAs above don't know about them. There is a flooded tunnel that leads up the surface - too long for most people to swim, but the thieves have installed a chain that use can use to pull yourself along. A scary thing to do but pretty reliable. They know not to venture down into the lower levels (to avoid the Chaos Eaters and Dimensional Vermin). 

- There is a room where three Starlings have barricaded their position against the thieves, and the roaming Chaos Eaters. If the players help them to the surface the BAs will give them a small reward. The Starlings will say that their captain has been possessed by a demon, and has run further into the prison. They will offer a reward if the players can bring their captain back alive.

- There are five escaped Chaos Eaters on this level, two in the mimic hell and three roaming the halls. They look like gigantic centipede-coded vermin and can instinctively control probability. They're not a specific species, they're a swarm of different worm-like, biting things. There will be physiological differences. 

- There are also many Dimensional Vermin in the level; they are invisible humanoids with commoner stats.

- There are two entrances to the underworld on this level, one natural and one artificial. The artificial one is a crack in the earth, and the natural one is a long, carved stair. The stair is carved with a warning (maybe a magic mouth? classic?) - 'fool! abandon hope of return!'. The crack in the earth is diseased. Both take around 10 hours of walking to get to the bottom of. 

    QUICK STATS

    CHAOS EATER: Huge (maybe 10 feet long) centipede vermin. Moves as a horse, armour as chain, 4HD, attacks for d10. When they hit you with an attack, your d20 rolls of 20 count as 10 for the rest of the combat. This effect stacks (so results of 20, 19, 18 and so on, different Chaos Eaters still stack), but only lasts for the combat. 

    DIMENSIONAL VERMIN: Stats as commoners, but with permanent invisibility. Scary to fight but not very tough. If you can see them they look like weird bright red, oily humanoids with staring eyes are long fingernails and teeth. The Hating Machines seed them through the timeline like equipment, to be made use of as terror weapons by their demon soldiers. They are mostly mindless. 

    MISERY: Misery has had the thieves who inhabit the upper levels build it a large puppet body of rags and wood. It prefers not to engage in combat, but if it does it has 4HD, defence as leather, and attacks twice for d6 with a long, sharpened iron needle. 

    THIEVES: Will need writing up as individuals. Most are basic bandits. 

    PRISONERS: Not all are dangerous, roll disposition when you encounter them. Hostile prisoners will be insane and will fight to the death with whatever they have picked up. 

This is basically your random encounter generator for the dungeon. 

Underworld (5 levels)

- The underworld is a series of natural caverns of living rock. The only natural light is bioluminescence, which is very rare - mostly pitch black. If you don't have light you're fucked. There is an ecosystem here, with flora, herbivores, and predators.

- Sections of the underworld will be diseased. Each room has a 1 in 10 chance of being diseased, rolled each time the PCs return here. The Monastery of the White Apes is always clean. 

- There are two NPC populations down here. One is of White Apes, the other is of Cuckoos. Cuckoos are known to be associated with the fall of the Old Kingdom. 

- The apes have a monastery here, where the largest and oldest of them meditate next to a naturally forming lake of petroleum. Their section of the underground is better lit, with phosphorescence and perhaps torches - White Apes have good low-light vision but cannot see in pitch blackness. They have a large jagged piece of flint onto which they execute and mercy kill people. Nothing sacrificed in this way will ever be raised again. There are a few zombies down here meditating with them, in advance of their truly final death - King Mag's body is among them, and can tell the story of the tower if spoken to. 

- There is one White Ape meditating who is way, way bigger than the others (like 15 feet tall, where even the biggest others are like 7 or 8 feet). This creature cannot be roused, not even by cutting into it. 

- Cuckoos are obviously unnatural creatures. They will surround the party and slowly start to take on their features and abilities over about 24 hours. Their 'natural' form is thin, paper white humans with no genitalia, with very large dark eyes and small, sharp teeth. While making the transformation they will also attempt to mimic the voice. If they are attacked, they will fight back in a swarm, with fists and teeth. There are various tribes of them in the Underworld. They really don't like light (it blinds them), but there are lots of them. If they are dissected (or killed by violence), the PCs will find that their internal organs are black and smell of petrol. They 'eat' petroleum, and usually cluster by rivers of the stuff. They breed by vomiting up a clutch of eggs, and are short lived (one or two years).

- There are Serpent Man tomb complexes on this level, carved into the rock (the stairway down is of Serpent make). Many are guarded by Serpent Thanes, buried alive with their mummified nobility. Serpent People are, like White Apes, biologically immortal, and they will defend their tombs. They are armed with ancient bronze armour and archaic weapons. Serpent people are large and strong, around 8 foot tall. The cuckoos were originally engineered by the serpents as infiltrators in ages past - the ones that remain down here are a degenerate, wild population of that original war-species. 

- One Thane was buried with his mate, who was stationed with him as a guard, but who long ago left his post and descended down the well into Chaos.

- The two final missing Starlings are down here with a pack of cuckoos who look exactly like them, but naked. The first unnamed demon is puppeting one of them (friendly, laughing, weirdly aggressive), and the other is almost catatonic with trauma and stress. The cuckoos will be protective of them. If you rescue the catatonic one, she will revive and tell you that the captain has ventured further in, possessed by a demon. 

- There are 10 Chaos Eaters left down here, and also 4 Law Eaters who have come up from below (giant praying mantises, or maybe giant blowflies?) Law Eaters are intelligent, and one of them is a soldier, armed with a sentient Chaos Blade and heavy, iridescent metal armour. They have come to hunt the Chaos Eaters, and will retreat back down into the earth when they are satisfied that they have all been destroyed. They are highly intelligent and will generally hunt as a unit. Against one or two Chaos Eaters they will usually win. Need stats. 

Chaos Blade: single piece of heavy iridescent metal that makes a strange ring if you hit it. 'Buds' of barbed metal studded at intervals down its blade. These flower off themselves in fractal patterns and are wickedly sharp. You use it like a Macuahuitl - it's a heavy club with ripping edges. Requires 14 STR to wield, +1 longsword, also gives +1 damage if used in two hands. It is sentient (barely), and remember God's pogroms against the core with terror and hatred. It counts as a +3/+3 weapon against angels and demons and screams as it slays them. 

- The White Apes have an altar with a circular pit that descends down into Chaos itself. They generally will not allow people to descend, unless the Law Eaters tell them to do so. The White Apes are not soldiers, not guarding the pit, and not especially vigilant. 

- If the players descend into Chaos, it will take them a day of climbing to reach the bottom of the shaft. There are handholds, but the climb will be arduous for humans (climbing gear and ropes will be needed to attempt this). The inscription at the rim reads 'none go unchanged' in the script of the white apes. 

Random Encounters: 

- White Apes

- Cuckoos

- Hunting Fauna (Hunter Maggots (scavengers), Brightmoths (predators), savage White Apes)

- Zombie Pilgrims (once)

- Chaos Eaters

- Law Eaters

UNDER CONSTRUCTION Chaos Itself 

- This section of chaos is made up of round tunnels bored into solid iron. The walls are oxidised and smell of blood. Sometimes they are honeycombed with pockets and indentations. They are bored with a spiral pattern, which, if examined, show the same fractal patterning as the edge of the Chaos Blade. In some section they glow red hot, and many parts of the honeycomb structure are infected with disease. In several places to the tunnels open up onto a wide openness of fire, plasma, fuel, and other high energy matter. The feeling is something like being inside a combustion engine.  

- This entire area is completely inimical to humans. They cannot survive here for any length of time. Each day you spend here you must make a CON save or suffer an insanity (maybe a list of chaos insanities?). After CON days the body will begin to die from exposure to the energies that flood this place. Each failed CON save after this will: a) strip 1 max HP from your character, and b) force a roll on the D+D table in addition to the normal insanity roll. White Apes are not humans, and can survive here as well as on the surface. 

- Hanging above this emptiness, accessible via the large dark metal chains that hold them in position, are several structures. They are also chained to one another, providing tenuous access. 

- The first is a large temple complex where the Law Eaters live. It is well stocked with valuable loot, and its floorplan shifts and changes. The Law Eaters are not hostile, although any character caught talking to God, and angel, or a demon will be attacked with intent to kill. Any diseased character will be killed from range. Their captains will speak Enochian badly, and they will teach you some Primordial (their language) if you stay peacefully for a month or two. There is nothing humans can eat in the monastery.

- The second is an elaborate iron mechanism/building of unclear purpose. The Law Eaters will tell you that it is the tomb of a soldier. If it is investigated (this is very difficult, as the mechanisms are working - it would be like crawling through a working mill), the tortured and restrained (but still living) body of one of God's crusader dragons will be found at its heart. The Dragon's limbs are smashed and it is gagged to prevent it from using the word or the breath. It is still wearing the Regalia of Heaven. 

- Further down still is something like a matter siphon or transfer that drops down into the boiling sea of high energy matter. It is made entirely from a strange white alloy that does not conduct any heat. The mechanism is completely infected with the Anathema, and hums audibly. Close inspection will reveal that there are also biological, muscle-like components mixed through the construction.

- The Captain of the Starlings is down here, with his Sword of Law. He has collapsed, and stares into the circular eye tube that drops into the white heat of the high energy matter. He makes no attempt to communicate, and if inspected will be found to be muttering feverish prayers to God. He was possessed by an Angel, not a demon, and this being rashly decided to use the Captain's body to launch an assault on Chaos, without really understanding what that meant. If you can escort it back to the surface (you will need to smuggle it somehow past the Law Eaters), the angel will leave the body of the Captain, who will survive the process, remembering everything. 

- The Captain is completely broken. He will give you his sword and armour and take a vow of silence, which will only last as long as it take for him to die of the Anathema. The angel will die the same way. 

- Anything that passes down the matter tube into the high energy materials will be annihilated without appropriate protective gear. Those WITH protective gear will find things elaborated on in a future post. 

The Culture of the Artists

She was delivered to the kitchens as a child, and she does not remember anything before this. She grew up avoiding people and trying not to be too visible. Then it was discovered that she could read and write, and she was apprenticed to one of the lord's illuminators, to be instructed in that trade. She was not a good student, but she was dedicated to improving, and she did, over time. She found it very difficult to concentrate on anything. Sometimes the stone walls around her appeared to become perfectly transparent, as though they were made from glass, and she could see everything that happened in every part of the manor. She remembers that this was when she first become aware of the tall man, squatting in his tower far above the rest of the huge stone complex, reading, or being screamed at by invisible beings. He first noticed her when he was informed at dinner, in an off-hand way, by one of the petty nobility, that she could read, and that she had apparently been able to do this as a very young child, since of course no one in the kitchens had taught her. She remembers his eyes, which she thought were actually a lot like hers: sparkling, crystalline, transparent, liable to see through things. Or not see through things, she thought, but bring other things into correspondence with their own transparency. To engineer a synthesis of these essential qualities, on their own terms, a synthesis that was described and delineated in language. The language could be precise and synthetic, or it could be maddeningly recursive and allusive, and the loose descriptions were the ones that she thought were dangerous. She did not know when or where she had learned to read and write, and she told the tall man this when she was asked, trying to make sure that he could not see into her eyes. There was a secret technique for hooding the gaze. It worked like this: she would imagine herself retreating backwards into her own head, behind a sturdy gate, and barring it shut. The gate was made of iron bars that she could see back through, across the newly created distance inside her skull, and out into the world. When she was behind the gate her eyes could not be easily identified. If she had a greater need for secrecy or discretion she would simply retreat behind a second gate, and close that, and then a third or a fourth, as necessary. The first time she did this, with the tall man looking into her face, she retreated behind gate after gate, maybe twenty or thirty of them, for what seemed like hours, but was actually only seconds. She thought that she deceived him, but he had seen what she was doing and marked it with intense interest, and from then on had her followed and her movements reported on by his agents. It took her many days to recover and come back to herself in the aftermath of this first meeting, but she did not suspect that she was in any danger.

She would think often about language games while she worked on manuscripts with the illuminator. She could not illustrate; had proved utterly incapable of this despite repeated and sustained effort, and so she was restricted to working on the letterforms, which she enjoyed embellishing and building out so that they were sometimes almost impossible to identify as letters at all. The illuminator found this frustrating at first, but over time begin to enjoy the game of puzzling out the script from the spidery, abstracted, geometric designs. They made an agreement: she would play her abstraction game only on the titles of the manuscripts, and would render the rest of the scripts in precise and legible characters, and in return he would inform the lord that these nearly incomprehensible titles were in fashion somewhere far away, and maintain this fiction, so that she could continue with her game. Eventually the titles of the works would cover nearly the whole of the cover or title page, leaving no room at all for illustrations of any kind, and she explained earnestly to the endlessly patient illuminator that it was because she was trying to enter the script into correspondence with the labour of illustration.

Her life at court became easier. She would continue this practice as she grew older: bringing incompatible affects and concepts into communication, to see how they would mutually infect one another and begin to make new and unexpected demands, of her and of the world around them. She made many fun and surprising discoveries this way, and most of these went unreported to anyone. Her joy was private and transient, which did not dim her enthusiasm at all. Every now and then she would sense that some specific formulation might be dangerous to her. In particular she found that using herself in the game, placing herself in relation with things that were unlike her, could have unintended and violent effects in her mind. She like the sun, like faeces, like intimacy, like a gift, like a wound. Each of these formulations took her days to recover from. So after a while she decided to avoid this, which made her sad (because she enjoyed the naive thought that she could implicate any two things into her system without damage, without changing), but which she felt (beneath the sadness) allowed her a degree of self-understanding. Armed with this self-knowledge she instead worked on making her thought processes breezy and slippy when she herself was their subject. One thing that she knew without needing to think about it was that she must never open this relative association between herself and another person. For a long time she was happy. 

BARONY v1

The first pass at the Minimal Setting Document is complete! You can see it here.  

I'm quite happy with the result, and would love to hear what others think. I will probably make a larger version with the various notes and lore of the setting at some point, but I think the original idea that you really don't need much to get a tone across has a kind of light touch elegance as well.

Specialist

Gang Bravo

A Minimal Setting Document - Languages

The final element in the original trifecta, a language list for the Barony. All elements of the minimal setting document are now complete, and I plan to stitch it together and publish it later today. 

MUNDANE LANGUAGES

Common

Assume that everyone speaks Common, which in the Barony is a trading language - a mix of the formal patrician language of the old kings, various regional vernaculars, and, importantly, many, many loan words from the language spoken in the White City (enough that Common is understood there). This language was formally adopted by the state about a hundred years ago, and there are city and regional accents that anyone from the region will distinguish.

The Language of the Kings

This is the old patrician language that was spoken by the nobility in the region of the Barony about three hundred years ago, before the string of disasters that destroyed the old kingship. It is sometimes spoken as a curiosity by academics, and it is periodically fashionable with the nobility to cycle old terms back into normal conversation. This would be about as pretentious as someone trying to use Latin or Old English phrases at a party - probably fun for about ten minutes, very quickly boorish. The official position in the Barony is that The Language of the Kings is a relic of a barbaric and culturally suicidal regime that deserved what happened to it. The Baroness in particular is known to loathe people speaking it in her presence. 

The Hunting Languages

These are a series of shrill whistles use by the gangs of the capital to communicate short (like three or four word) phrases back and forth in code. Every gang has its own language, although they are all built on similar grammars and have a core set of 'words' in common. 

Thanks to M. John Harrison for these, they were entirely too cool not to lift. Everyone should read Viriconium. 

Imperial

This is the language that is spoken in the White City. If you speak Common you will pick up about one third of what is being said, but the language has complicated grammar and is densely allusive, and native speakers will tell you that what you really get (because you're being so literal about it) is only about one tenth of what is intended. The image culture of the White City is complex and recursive, and Imperial has evolved in communication with it. There are also Imperial war languages that are spoken by the soldiers (and by the Courtesans). These are brutally stripped back and sentences are generally only three or four words long. They are infamously impossible to parse for civilians, and units and kill teams often invent their own grammatical and vocabulary quirks. In the White City, the speech of people who have served in the military is stereotyped as nearly comically laconic and direct, much to the amusement of regular citizens, whose speech is famously florid, pedantic, and imagist. 

EXOTIC LANGUAGES

Pattern Languages

The 'languages' spoken by the entities. It is not possible to speak a pattern language without years of study, or without a degree of intuitive facility. They are words and grammars but they are also images, and without the ability to hold images in your mind you will not be able to make yourself understood. In some ways sense-making is ekphrastic, which can be deeply counterintuitive. You might describe your anger in reference to an image which you must also describe in fine enough detail that the other can also hold the image in mind. Images can also be layered atop one another, and the relations between them can be described in terms of opacity, transparency, or reflection. All of this is done linguistically, and it is enormously complicated. It generally takes years for someone without a knack for how it works to pick up even the simplest phrases and inflections.

Adding to the difficulty, most entities will speak their own pattern language, which will be totally unique and dependant on a series of images and postures invented by that entity to describe their sense of the world. The students of the academy generally learn one or two of the relatively stable 'meta languages' (listed below), which give a good grounding in the concepts needed to develop the possibility of deep communication and understanding with an intelligent entity. Entities are enormously predisposed to like and trust someone who learns how to talk with them on a their level - who puts time into understanding the images that they have developed to express themselves, and the relations between these. 

It is one of the foundational rules of the academy that pattern languages must never be developed for communication between two humans. Even more so, the academic must never attempt to communicate with themselves using a pattern language, or develop a pattern language of their own in isolation.

Enochian

The pattern metalanguage spoken by angels, demons, and all undead and soulless bodies. All entities who claim to be from the future speak Enochian. Most academics speak it as well, it is considered the 'introductory' pattern language, and is usually presented as the easiest to deal with as the images that it makes use of are fixed, legible, and relatively intuitive. God and its angels are famous for maintaining that Enochian is what all other pattern languages turn into in the future. Demons think this is hilarious and joke about it often.

The Language of the Stars

This is the metalanguage of the one hundred or so bodiless entities who claim to be stars in the sky. It is also spoken by the beings of the upper air who are descended from them, and by entities who claim kinship with the moon. It is another of the 'introductory' languages, although considered a pretty serious step up from Enochian because of the abstract quality of the images that it develops. It is known to introduce a certain coldness and lack of care and emotion in those who speak it often. 

The Language of the Artists

This is a strange pattern language spoken between humans. Academics like to say that it is not really a pattern language, and the artists that speak it don't care enough to contradict them. It was developed naively, out of necessity, so that artists could talk about what they were making. It is famous for its conceptual flexibility, and is stereotyped as asserting that any two arbitrary things can be shown to be both like and unlike one another. 

The First Language of God

This is not really a pattern language, and no one speaks it or knows that it exists. It was taught to the dragons that they might speak the Word during their crusade against chaos at the beginning of things. Anyone that hears you speak this will understand you. Angels and demons will flee from you, First Humans will obey you. A human body speaking it will burn like a torch under the strain. Literally translated, the First Language refers to itself as something like 'all language' or 'the concept of language'.