Class - Manikin

Inspired by recent doll chat in Phlox's discord (and especially this doll by Thistle). 

The secrets of manikin construction died with the cursed King Magda, but they were known to involve the dissection and redistribution of entity-minds across multiple puppet bodies. How this was accomplished is unknown, and the official position is that further research in the field would be unethical and irresponsible. 

Your mind is not your own. Your body does not feel. If you really concentrate you might be able to isolate a simple thought, a desire, a pleasure-sense, but always fleeting and blurred.

MANIKIN

You have a body of cloth, wood, or iron. If cloth, you have 1HD at template A, are unarmoured, do not take fall damage, and move completely silently. If wooden, you have 2HD at template A, armour as chain, float in water, and take -1 damage from all physical sources. If iron, you have 3HD at template A, armour as plate, sink in liquid and weigh 5 times what a human does, cannot move quietly, and take a maximum of 1 point of damage from physical attacks.

You never take fear damage, do not feel pain, are unaffected by disease or poison, and never need to eat or sleep. You cannot speak, although you can read and write. You cannot regain HP in the normal ways - instead you must be repaired. For a cloth manikin, this can be done by anyone with fabric and a needle and thread, and you heal 1 hp per five minutes spent sewing. For a wooden manikin, this must be done with spare timber by a specialist carpenter, at a rate of 1 hour per HP, or a full day to restore fully. For an iron manikin, this must be done by a blacksmith in a forge, and takes 1 day per HP healed. 

Starting skills: a single, simple trade (sewing, pattern cutting, woodchopping, dishwashing, modelling nice clothing for your Petty King, etc.).

Starting gear: the tool or tools associated with the skill you chose. This could be nothing.

A Pure Machinery, Disordered Will
B Lock-In
C Ideation
D +4 WIS, +4 CHAR, The Play of the Dream of Your Life

Pure Machinery: Under normal circumstances, you cannot act at all - you simply stand motionless. There are two exceptions to this. The first is routines. You may design 2+[templates] routines that are directly derived from your starting skill. A routine is a simple, repetitive series of tasks. They can involve precise and dextrous work, but no imagination or abstract thinking. You may choose to start or cease acting out one of your routines at any time. The second exception is orders. If someone else tells you to do something, you do it. You can make a list with [templates] names on it (each name added is permanent and cannot be changed), whose orders are treated preferentially, and override those of others not on the list. Otherwise new orders cancel older ones. You cannot decide not to follow an order. 

Disordered Will: You have a special reservoir of resources called Will. Will is equal to 10x[templates], and you regain a single point of expended Will every night at midnight. You can use a point of Will to give yourself an order. You can also use will to fight against the orders of others - this means that instead of following their orders, you instead do nothing. For each minute spent fighting the orders of another, you must spend another point of Will. 

Lock-In: While executing any order (from you or someone else), you may now choose to Lock In. This means that you no longer hear orders until your current order has been completed. Once Locked In, you cannot do anything but follow your order until it is done, and you cannot choose to end this effect early.

Ideation: The blooming of your consciousness takes time, and its first murmurings are things of great beauty and fragility. You can now dream by being still and letting your mind disengage. In the dreamlands, you may now act under your own power, as any other thinking thing would. If someone reads your mind, you can converse with them freely. You can freely choose not to follow orders that would put you or anyone that you love at risk, and this no longer spends Will.

The Play of the Dream of Your Life: A fractured, disordered life, but no less beautiful for it. You may now write a script each day (a day resets at midnight). This can be as long, short, complex, or simple as you like. At any point during the day you may choose to ignore all other orders and instead act out your script. This costs you no Will, and you may do it as many times as you wish. In the dreamlands you are radiantly beautiful, and its inhabitants would never think to harm you. If you ever meet the Prince of Dreaming, he will delight in your company. You will be offered a place in his court as an honoured guest and advisor for as long as you wish to remain. 

Hans Bellmer

Postures and the Image Game

 

I've been thinking about the image game again. Undoubtedly this is for my sins. 

The game players in the White City have several centuries of cultural experience to draw on in their play. This has lead to the development of a series of legible 'postures' that experienced players can identify and place in relation to one another. Sophisticated play involves both identification of postural switching, and also knowing when it makes sense to abandon a posture or scramble its legibility. Of course, since posture switching is relational and contingent on the play of others, doing this well is high-risk, and involves a degree of mutual pre-empting and strategising. Most players aver that this is best done via rational strategy and constant oversight of images produced (successful players often gather a 'staff' of sharp young proteges around them who take this role) - certainly this is the most straightforward way to play successfully. 

There are others though, whose focus is on the skin-felling of real-time intuition. The most celebrated are capable of intuiting the shifts in the game well in advance, sometimes so far in advance that they appear to be playing poorly in the present, only to be vindicated years or decades later. There is a category of player whose entire focus is on decoding the signals and images produced by these 'naturals,' and producing commentaries and analysis for general consumption by lower-skill players, who hope to glean something of the 'natural' genius and make use of it in their own play.

Naturals are a strange phenomenon. Since they lay claim to the future, none can truly say with finality whether they are playing successfully or not. Their playing is a matter of personal faith, and all successful naturals eventually develop a sort of psychotic, internal, steel-hard consistency in their self belief. Sometimes this is not enough, and they crumble - they are found to have been playing poorly the entire time. This happens all at once, in a reveal, and can have horrifying implications on the broader game. 

Rarely they are able to maintain their own holy insulation from the analysis, the critique, the gaze, and the desire of the rest of the city, and maintain the ambiguity in their play until the end. These are the most celebrated citizens of all, and often become images in their own right after death, deployed in the game as short hand for their own elaborate play in its entirety - its specificities will be entirely legible to any serious player who knows their history, and the particular flourishes and techniques layer on top of one another and result in richer and denser play as the years roll on.

Some theorists opine that the layering and recursion of the image game will eventually reach a density such that no individual posture will be discreetly legible. Naturals and their adherents laugh at this. What could be more flexible, more demanding, more generous, more fractally complex and multiform, than they player and the field? What could be more at home than the eye and the calculating mind that swim in micro-specificities of intuition, enunciation, of showing and obscuring?

There is not system that cannot be decoded and incorporated. There is no position that cannot be undermined and made use of. There is no image that cannot be turned into just more raw materials. 

Nothing adheres and nothing remains. 

If you would know the contents of my soul, study Paul Thek.

Kill Squad Generator

I am currently trying and failing to write anything worthwhile or coherent. The fault, I suspect, is in the brain. So it goes.

In the interim:

Barony Kill Squad Generator

As mentioned in this post, most 'warfare' in the Barony takes the form of low level skirmishing and manhunting, fought between semi-professional armed groups, generally captained by fixers and ex-mercenaries. When things get real there are house troops and mercenaries to call on, but that's not what this post is about.

You will usually find kill squads operating at the borders of the petty King and Queendoms, where they will generally have a specific mission and scope of operations. Sometimes this is five people who are trying to find a debtor and capture or kill him. Sometimes it's sixty people who are under general orders to kill, steal, maim, terrorise, and salt the earth until the troops arrive to drive them out. Sometimes they are from the Church, and everyone knows what that means. 

Members of a kill team are statted as commoners (if unarmoured), bandits (if in light armour), or men at arms (if in medium or heavy armour). 

This Kill Squad is captained by:

• 1-4: A Petty Nobility fixer. Specialist, d3 templates.
• 5-6: A Church fixer. Specialist d3 templates, 1 in 2 chance of 1 template in Little Saint.
• 7: A pair of Baronial Agents. Specialist/Fighters, both with d3 templates split as you wish.
• 8: An ex-mercenary captain, under the employ of whichever major power player makes most sense. Fighter, d3+1 templates, staff of d4 men at arms in addition to the rest of the kill squad.
• 9: A Noble in person, in the field furthering their own interests. Fighter/Specialist, d3 templates split as you wish. Also one adjunct-bodyguard, with one template in either Chemist or Steward, and one template in Fighter. The Noble is wearing 400s worth of finery. 
• 10: Something weird! Roll a d4: 1, a Nomad Errant whose good faith has been manipulated by others. 2, a God Warrior, who leads this band following divine visions. 3, a White Ape who speaks flawless common, wears plate armour and wields a sword, and has convinced his followers that he is a foreign dignitary. 4, a Citizen of the White City, here on missions obscure - don't kill them, and if you do, disappear. Each has d3+1 templates.

This Kill Squad is:

• 1-4: 2d4 people strong. Their mission is to murder a single person or family. 
• 5-6: 2d6 people strong. Their mission is to murder a single person or family who are unusually hard to murder. 
• 7: 2d8 people strong. Their mission is to murder the leadership and defenders of an isolated village. 
• 8: 2d8+5 people strong. Their mission is to kill enough people in an isolated village that the rest are forced to flee. 
• 9: 2d8+10 people strong. Their mission is recon in force; to live off the land and murder, pillage, and destroy what they can until they are driven off by organised resistance. 
• 10: 2d8+30 people strong. Their mission is to organise long term instability and terror in the region. Even if driven away they will return to mount raids and punitive attacks in the area for as long as their numbers are not depleted. 

This Kill Squad are:

• 1-4: Poorly armed, with 50/50 light and no armour, 50/50 with shields, and clubs, knives, and short swords. 
• 5-7: Well armed, with 50/50 light and medium armour, shields, sword and hammers, knives, and 1 in 5 carrying crossbows. 
• 8-9: Professionally armed. All in medium armour with shields, spears, swords, and knives. 1 in 3 have 50/50 crossbows or muskets. 
• 10: Elite. As professionally armed, but 1 in 5 have plate armour, and all ranged weapons are muskets. 

Something odd about them:

• 1-5. Nothing! Hardbitten Baronial bastards with murder in their hearts. 
• 6: Poison. 1 in 5 of them (always including their captain) poison their weapons. 50/50 chance of CON save for d8 damage, or exposure to a random disease. 
• 7: Hounds. They are accompanied by d6 vicious dogs.
• 8: Firearms. d3 of them have pistols, another d3 have blunderbusses.
• 9: Undead. 1 in 5 of them are actually indentured zombies. These slave soldiers will not be overly concerned about the fate of their masters.
• 10: Ape Doppelsoldners. 1 in 5 of them are actually enslaved white ape berserks. They carry fearsome flamberges, wear heavy plate, and are deployed by their commanders like equipment. Easily spooked with fire or explosions. If they lose their nerve they might drop their weapons, or attack whoever is nearest. 
• 11: City People. 2 of them are single template Academics, Artists, or Bravos. They might be here for their own reasons, under duress, or for pay. 
• 12: Cannibals. They eat their victims after killing them. Sometimes they eat them alive. Replace their captain with a 4 template Ogre.
• 13: Bloodtinge. They have been out here for too long and begun to lose themselves to bloodlust. Replace all members of the band with War Dogs, and their captain with a Werewolf.
• 14: Diseased. They are sick, and desperate for medicine. If they don't get it they will die in the next d2 weeks. Visibly contagious people have no rights in the Barony, and are treated as inhuman, monstrous things. Randomly determine the disease.
• 15: Future War. Their captain is really an Angel/Demon, following its own particular set of intuitions about the will of God/The Hating Engines. This is well-disguised most of the time, though half of the Kill Squad are beginning to suspect. 
• 16: Wealthy. They have been robbing and waylaying merchants. The captain is wearing 1000s worth of finery, and the squad's gear is one tier higher than whatever you rolled. If they were already 'elite', they now all have plate armour. 
• 17: Specialist. Accompanied by even chances of: a siege engineer with a large demolition explosive; a sharpshooter with a rifled musket (as musket but doubled range and +2 to hit if you don't move the turn you fire); a tracker who can always find your trail; a torturer who scares normal people enough that they will do anything the kill squad ask.
• 18: Beloved. This kill squad has local support and admiration; maybe they saved them from something, maybe they are in their own territory. Whatever the reason, their mission will be elsewhere (or they might be persecuting a hated minority), and local settlements will not tolerate anyone trying to harm them. 
• 19: Church Assassin. Captained by one of the feared and deadly Church Assassins. One day I will finish their post! In the meantime, treat them as a 4 template Specialist with top level equipment. 
• 20: Band of Heroes. Roll up a captain for every 5 member of the kill squad, and then get rid of all non-captain members. 

Everyone should watch Hard to be a God. 

The Orchids Bath House

I have been enjoying writing up little dungeons recently, so here is another, this time set in the heart of the Baronial Capital. 

THE ORCHIDS BATH HOUSE

The Prince of Psychics (a name he gave himself) is a tenured professor at one of the academies, and a would-be political player in the capital. He has recently overplayed his meagre hand in pursuit of this goal, and become an active nuisance to some dangerous people in the Baroness' spy service. They have hired you as deniable assets, to kill or permanently disfigure him.

You are given intelligence that the Prince keeps a scheduled visit with a favourite sex worker, a young man named Zero Image, at a bathhouse in the poor districts called The Orchids. The Orchids is popular, rough, and under the protection of House Ajax, one of the local Bravo gangs.

You are given a date and time, and a downpayment of 500 silver, and made to understand that you will receive no official assistance, favours, or recognition of any kind in this business. 

• Payment on kill: 2000 silver.
• Payment on permanent disfigurement (which must include blinding and amputation of the tongue): 1000 silver. 
• Bonus if it looks like an accident: 1000 silver.
• Bonus if no one will ever find the body: 1000 silver. 
• The Prince can be recognised by appearance (greying-blonde hair, early forties, medium height, thin), and by his jewellery and makeup: a lead teardrop on a short, silver-chain necklace, heavy eye makeup wet and crimson in the Bravo style, two plain steel bracelets.

What everyone knows about The Orchids:

• Fights happen all the time at The Orchids, and the staff usually handle things in house, with clubs if necessary. People getting killed is a different thing, and very bad for business. They have a large bell affixed to the roof that they can ring to summon fighters from House Ajax if they need to.
• Like most of the old bath houses in the city, The Orchids is split between public pools and open-air bathing squares, and private rooms where people can talk business or pleasure with professionals, lovers, chemists, friends, whoever.
• The boiler and fuel store are located on the second floor of the premises, so that the heated water can be gravity-fed down into the baths.
• Staff areas are off limits to the public. 

What everyone knows about House Ajax:

• Captained by a rich young noble scion who uses the hunting name What Difference Hornet Queen. She is the daughter of a powerful merchant: a major financial backer of the Baroness' nascent state army project. Killing her would be an extremely bad idea. Hornet Queen is famously fearless in battle, and when she fights with the intent to kill she uses a brace of pistols (a conspicuous display of wealth). 
• The gang champion is a hulking young man with the hunting name Ambuscade. He is quiet, good looking, and very, very good at killing people in one-on-one cross knife duels. 
• House Ajax are on unusually good terms with the Baronial Agents, and the two often work together to keep public order in their territory. 
• Their soldiers are constantly alert for enemies encroaching on their territory. The Orchids is ostensibly neutral ground, but bravos significantly lack impulse control.

Level One - The Orchids

ROOMS - LEVEL ONE

1. Lobby. Opens onto the street with a door of heavy iron grillwork - this is kept open during opening hours. Floors and walls are polished white tiles, and the walls are painted with bright frescos of the body in motion. Emphasis is on clean limbs, calm faces, uniform proportions - the body in health and youth. In the alcove to the east is a counter manned by one of the staff, and the entrance to the north is manned by two guards. They will take your entry fee (by law and custom, a single piece of copper. Bath houses are subsidised by the state), and ask you to strip and surrender your gear and weapons. An attendant will take these and put the in Cloak, and give you a small numbered token on a leather thong that you can use to reclaim your gear. You will only be allowed to enter nude (jewellery is accepted). Additionally, you can buy a second type of neck token which will get you entry to the Private Rooms. This will cost you 10 silver. There are three tokens you can buy this way: orange, yellow, and black. Red, Green, and Blue are already rented. 
2. Cloak. This is where the patrons' clothes, possessions, and weapons are kept. Items are placed in numbered alcoves. There are currently 2d6+6 alcoves worth of gear in here, watched over by a member of the security team. Each will contain: common clothes, 2d6 silver, 1 in 2 percent chance of a random weapon. There is a 1 in 20 chance that each will contain even odds of an expensive piece of armour, a loaded firearm, or an additional 2d10x5 silver. In addition, a hanging pull rope rings a large bell built into the roof of the bath house. If this bell is rung, fighters from House Ajax will arrive in three minutes: see below for details. The pit at the eastern end is where refuse is dumped, and is covered with a heavy wooden cover. A small bronze lamp burns incense to ward against the smell. If you make trouble for the guards they will probably try to beat you up and throw you into the pit to cool off.  
3. Public Bathing Square. The largest of the public bathing areas. The shaded area denotes the bath itself - around 5ft deep, with three broad steps running around its circumference. The large uniform tiles are glossy and white, but softly discoloured from decades of use. The bathing area at the centre is open to the sky, and the perimeter walkway is beneath vaulted arcades. The walls are painted in the same style as those in the Lobby, although in this case the bodies have been placed in the heavens, among the clouds and the sparkling rays of the sun. The pool is constantly fed by flowing channel from outside the building, and drains into an overflow, keeping the water fresh. There are 3d10 members of the public bathing nude in the clear, cold water, 4 members of the bath house staff on hand to attend to the public, and 4 guards with cudgels at their hips. There is general hubbub and happy shouting. The opening to the north has no doors, and leads to the Hot Baths. 
4. Public Hot Baths. The room is dark, steamy, and heavily scented with medicinal oils. The light comes in at the entrances at the south and north, and the rest of the space has no windows or other openings to let light in. The water is very hot - just below scalding - and the skin of the 2d10 patrons in the water has a boiled, red look. Youths like to challenge one another to contests of endurance in baths like this. The water is heated and pumped up from the basement level, and escapes into an overflow, keeping it moving and fresh. The wall frescoes are less vigorous here, and tend towards introspective figures with faces lost in shadow. Conversations tend towards the intimate, although no one is whispering and loud laughter can be heard at intervals. There are 4 members of the bath house staff and 2 guards in this room. The guards are stationed at the east and west sides, and they will check passes for the six Private Hot Rooms. 
5. VIP Area. A special, private room available for hire. The door is locked. Features its own hot pool (to the north), cold pool (the south), black iron tables and chairs for ten patrons, and a locked drug cabinet full of high quality working and leisure drugs (10 doses each of stimulants, sedatives, psychotics, and psychedelics. Also 2 doses of (illegal) Imperial Teacher Drugs, coded to teach you how to be a better sex partner. The room is heavily perfumed, totally dark, and currently empty. Unlike the public spaces, the walls in here have been painted with a series of iconic portraits of the past Barons and Baronesses, and other recognisable civic heroes. This style of decoration is common practice in rooms where business takes place, and is thought to have a pedagogical effect. The keys to the door and cabinet are held by the clerk in the Lobby. 
6. Staff Rooms. The door is not locked, but it is barred with a mechanism that can be lifted from the outside and inside. It is designed to designate a restricted area, not keep people out. Inside, there are wooden tables and chairs where the staff can take breaks and eat. The room is undecorated, and large, glazed windows on the northern wall let in natural light. There are four members of staff in here. The iron spiral stairwell to the west leads up into the second level: the Boiler and Fuel Store. 
7. Staff Armoury and Facilities. The guards on duty carry clubs, but there are also 4 suits of bulky leather light armour, 5 knives, and 8 spears in this armoury. They have not seen use in any employee's living memory. There are 6 guards off duty in this room, reading, gambling, or smoking, as well as the guard captain Ereshegal. 
8. Storage. Spare tokens, towels, salts, oils, etc. Everything the bath house needs to function is stored on wooden shelving. All told, probably worth about 400s if you could shift it all, with the majority of that cost in salts and oils. 
9. Private Hot Rooms. These are private rooms with lockable doors. The keys are held by the guards in the Hot Baths, who will open them for you if you show the correct token. Each room is the same - a small hot pool outfitted with an inflow and overflow, two small wooden benches, a wooden side table. The rooms are dark (no windows), but the inhabited rooms will be lit with candles. The Red Room (indicated with a star on the map) is inhabited by the Prince of Psychics and Zero Image. The rooms, clockwise from the red room, are: Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Black. The Green Room is occupied by all five members of the Machines Are Digging three-word gang. The Blue Room contains a young couple on a first date (it's going well!). The Orange, Yellow, and Black rooms are empty. Each of the private rooms has white tiled floors and 'chaos scene' frescoes, painted in their appropriate colour. 
10. Cold Plunge. The final public space of the bath house. Two, small, identical rooms with very deep cold plunge pools, each naturally lit from high windows. The pools are about three metres deep. In more expensive venues these plunges are full of ice, but not here - they are simply less sun-warmed than the open public area. They are fed with inflow and overflow. Each room has one staff attendant and d6 patrons. The frescoes in both are painted white-on-white and are difficult to make up, but appear to depict rays of sunlight travelling through smoke and refracted through glass. 

Level Two - Boiler and Fuel Store

ROOMS - LEVEL TWO

1. Starwell Landing. This room is cool and empty, and smells strongly of coal, smoke, and petrol. It is lit via a window on the western wall. Even in the sunlight, shuddering red light from the furnace to the north is visible on the bare walls. You can also hear the roaring of the fire. 
2. Boiler. A large iron furnace (northern wall) beneath an equally large iron Boiler. The walls are covered in iron pipework. The noise from the furnace is loud, and the room is extremely hot. The boiler is fed by an external aqueduct (which is split, it also feeds the cold bathing pools), and the boiling water runs down into the hot bath by gravity overflow. Two filthy, sweating bath house workers, stripped to the waste, carry coal from the storage to the furnace every ten minutes or so, using a hand cart and shovels. They will tell you to leave if they see you, as this area is off limits. Lit by filthy skylights.  
3. Angel's Bath. An off-limits shrine dedicated to God and its angels. A rope across the entrance bars access, even to staff. The 'Angel's Bath' is often built into public spaces in the capital, and consists of a large petroleum bath and a smaller bath of holy water, usually separated by a timber screen. Travelling between the two has religious significance. The shrine itself is bare stone, well-lit by broad windows, but the two baths are tiled with the same white tiles as the public spaces of the house. The timber screen is painted with stylised images of angels killing demons. The walls are bare but for a single, strange painting, very unlike those in the rest of the building - it is done very crudely, in thick black paint, and shows a winged human body spreadeagled in the sky, amongst what could be stars or flowers. The image has had its face carved out with a blade or hammer. This room is thick with dust, and has clearly not been entered in years. 
4. Fuel Store A. A large, square stone room, unadorned and lit by skylight. It contains wooden logs on iron shelving, and four casks of clear-burning oil. Otherwise empty. 
5. Fuel Store B. A large, square stone room, unadorned and lit by skylight. It is about half full of coal, and the floors and walls are filthy and black. A channel through the centre leads to Fuel Store C. A member of the bath house staff is seated against a wall, reading. 
6. Fuel Store C. A large, square stone room, unadorned and lit by skylight. It is completely full of coal, and cannot be entered more than a couple of feet without digging into the stuff. The floors and walls are filthy and black. 

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

• The Prince of Psychics. Will stay at The Orchids for two hours. Arrogant and domineering. HD2, unarmed and unarmoured, speed as human, disposition: quick to anger and violent, but ultimately a coward. If he believes he is in danger he will make use of the various entities in his service: at the start of each of his turns he does 1 psychic damage to all enemies in the same room as him, which stacks to a maximum of 4. In addition, if he can look you in the eyes, you must test CHAR or by paralysed and take an additional d4 psychic damage. 
• Zero Image. The sex worker currently entertaining The Prince. Young, blonde, doe-eyed, and a lot smarter than he looks. He has stats as a commoner and is unarmed and unarmoured, but keeps a glass vial of acid around his neck at all times for self defence. The bath staff know him and allow this - his job is dangerous. In the Red Room, this vial is hung up on the wall. Zero Image hates the Prince, and would quite happily murder him, but won't do anything illegal without being well paid for it. 
• Machines Are Digging. All five members of the gang are together in the Green Room, discussing speculative cryptography with the infectious enthusiasm of undergraduates. They are enemies of House Ajax, and coming here together is something like a provocation mixed in with a proof of personal courage. Each member of the gang is a 1HD commoner with access to one of the following entity powers (even odds): +d4 psychic damage to unarmed attacks, d3 psychic damage per turn to one target they can see, single use d8 psychic damage to a single enemy they can see, single use 1 hour of blindness to one enemy they can see (CHAR saves). 
• Ereshegal. Guard Captain at the bath house and has been doing this for years. He is a large, stocky man, and has mercenary experience. Actually very sweet to his workers and known as a softy at heart, but can turn on the professional intimidation quickly and completely when he needs to. HD2, cudgel (d4 bludgeoning x2), armour as leather, speed: human, disposition: makes his living being someone you don't want to have to deal with, extremely unpleasant to troublemakers. 
• All bath house staff are statted as commoners. They will flee to the guards at the first sign of trouble, and ring the bell summoning House Ajax is anyone fights back against them. 
• All guards are statted as bandits, with no armour and carrying cudgels. They will congregate towards sounds of trouble and beat unconscious anyone they think might be responsible. 

HOUSE AJAX

• If the bell is rung, House Ajax will respond in three minutes, and then again with reinforcements, three minutes after that. The first group will be made up of 6 Ajax Bravos, and 50/50 odds of Ambuscade or What Difference Hornet Queen. The second group will be comprised of 10 Ajax Bravos, and whichever of the named captains has yet to arrive. All Bravos communicate by whistling in their hunting language while in colours.  
• If anyone from House Ajax sees anyone from Machines are Digging, they will attack without provocation, assuming that the rival gang are responsible for the trouble at the baths. 
• What Difference Hornet Queen is a proud and bloodthirsty young woman who relishes street conflict. She and her gang will not be looking to kill people in the first instance, but it takes very little (maybe even a disrespectful look) for them to switch into lethal intent. They are being summoned because there is unspecified trouble, and will be on alert. Ambuscade is utterly loyal to her (he is also in love with her, but is good at hiding this) and will do anything, or kill anyone, that she tells him to. 
• What Difference Hornet Queen. HD2, cross knife, two pistols, medium armour, speed: human, disposition: here to fuck people up. She is immune to fear. She is also protected by powerful interests in the city - killing her will have them trying to kill you in retaliation. 
• Ambuscade. HD3, cross knife (attacks twice), plate armour, speed: human, disposition: reserved, systematically lethal, imperturbable. When Ambuscade is fighting one-on-one, he gains +1 to hit and +1 crit range for each round that the fight goes on, capping at +5 to each. He can also parry once per turn, reducing the damage from a single melee attack by d8. He is immune to fear. If he sees you kill Hornet Queen, he will immediately do anything in his power to avenge her and will additionally cease to feel pain (-1 physical damage form all sources). 
• Ajax Bravo: stats as bandits, with light armour and cross knives. 1 in 3 additionally cary rapiers. All wear harlequin half capes and bravo masks, and won't test morale as long as both Hornet Queen and Ambuscade are alive and fighting. 

I love Cronenberg's noir-ey middle period <3

Shit - The Sump - The Roots of the Earth - The End of Intelligibility

I had a good little exchange with the lovely Morgan last night about shit and sewage in dungeons. The basic premise was that, if you have monsters (or humans) in your dungeon, and if those monsters eat, then they need to shit somewhere. One ought to have a toilet, a latrine pit, a hole in the earth, whatever, for them to do this.

Not such a mind blowing idea, but it got me thinking - I always do this, and those rooms are usually the locus of something in my dungeons. I'm not especially interested in the long-running debates around naturalism and realism in dungeons - I like spaces to be 'convincing', as opposed to 'realistic'. Something can be made convincing ('consistent' is another word that feels relevant here) without reference to realism, and there are any number of ways you can do this. 

In my dungeons, an inhabited space will generally have:

• Somewhere the inhabitants sleep.
• Somewhere they eat.
• Somewhere they shit.
• A place where the food comes from.

Once these are in place, the rest is gravy. But I'm personally interested in what the something mentioned above is, the room or the pit or the trench where the waste goes and the stench comes from. You can always smell it before you see it. This is a place of no honour, etc. etc. 

I have some sense that personal dignity is an important component in the image of the hero and the sage; they have the dignity of their majesty, indifference, resources, and especially their insulation. They can say no, they can take time to think and know their minds, they don't spend their days doing drudge work. Even the most horrible adventuring is more fun than tilling the fields or carrying shit - it is certainly more interesting and glamorous day-to-day. Something in here too about the libertarian fantasy of the adventurer band whose material competence and clear, unclouded, pragmatic vision and thinking allows them to make good without any mutual dependence on the societies they exist inside of. 

The sump is the antithesis to this insulated dignity. It is where everything that cannot be allowed into the sacral/civic space collects and rots and ferments. It is, I think, a good thing to make your heroes wade through filth in the pursuit of their aims. To have to touch the stuff, to be covered in it, to feel its reek and be in danger of poisoning and infection - a reversal of the heroic posture. The realisation that you are not immune - that your physical/mental/spiritual integrity is contingent and cannot be relied on - that you are, in some deep way, made of the same, abject fundamental stuff - a potent set of horror images. 

I remember in a crit during my MFA (years ago now) discussing the difference between a vampire and a cannibal. The vampire operates on a principle of symbolic draining and transference - it takes your essence and makes you dead but alive, unlike yourself. The cannibal eats you and shits you out. There is nothing symbolic about this - it shows you that beneath your various insulating layers of sentience, symbol, dignity, and remove, you are meat, which is eventually shit, and nothing more. In dnd terms, I think this is one of the reasons why ghouls and gnolls remain such good horror mainstays (related: vexingly, I've yet to get my head around what a Barony gnoll looks like - maybe they are just the dogs of war?).

The body as meat is also the body as breeding site for diseases and parasites. It is porous and cannot protect itself. No end to the vectors of degradation. 

Why is this fun? I think it's fun because it's more true to how it is to live in the world, where most people are exposed to arbitrary illness with few options to treat it, have their bodies fail, are confronted with their own contingent survival. There's all sorts of reason why roleplaying can be an escape from these things, but my sense is that art that tries to say something about human existence (a tall order at the very best of times with the very best of minds, obviously), probably should have something to say about decay, impermanence, sickness, death, etc. These things also throw courage, strength, friendship, devotion, kindness etc. into their proper relief - as something that can save you from the horror. You can dispense with the 5e thing of LARPing the Power of Friendship, and re-cohere onto what is actually valuable (and beautiful, sublime) in having people in your life who you can trust, implicitly, with your life.  

The sump, then, is a horror stage on which humanity can be revealed as frail, vulnerable, precious, powerful. Deep underground, deep in the muck and the stench and the gore, where no one else will hear you die, and where the things that swarm around you understand this and can taste the terror of it. 

You could be reduced to matter, to shit, by the grinding material gears around you (they have to be material, they have to be impartial, they have to be without mercy, you cannot fudge dice rolls); or you could triumph - find strength, assert your dignity in the worst place, emerge changed. 

There is a limit state, after which this assertion is no longer impossible. Where matter churns together so violently that no one can save you. You cross the threshold and you are damned. Again, this must be a material process and not a spiritual one - it is impartial and utterly destroying. These limits (they exist in all directions, interior and exterior) are the frame inside which an articulation of human dignity can find meaning. 

The killing tools of your profession, the strength of your arm, the steel in your mind, your mettle, your courage; all of them tested by these means or none!

Dungeon - The Blister

A few days ago I gave Loch a prompt for a dungeon, here. They have given me one in return: Decay. 

-

THE BLISTER

Far too far out into the Forest of Worms is a strange excavation of no known purpose or origin. If you were to set out from the closest walled settlement, it would take you a couple of days on foot through the dark undergrowth. The passage is dangerous and has never been cleared.

The structure itself is known as the Blister for its odd, humped shape. There are rumours that it contains relics and treasure, and desperate fortune hunters occasionally make the trip. Most turn back or are killed on the approach. Some claim to have arrived there and report a wide stone shaft and wooden scaffolding built at its edges, leading down into blackness. 

Only the desperate would attempt such an expedition. There are those who cast doubt on the whole story; a vicious set of rumours that draw the foolish to their deaths. But the Blister exists. 

THE APPROACH

The approach is through the Forest of Worms, and will take you two days of walking. There is an old pre-collapse stone road that takes you two thirds of the way, and then the instructions are to follow the slope of the earth downwards. The trees are huge, ancient, and silent, and little light breaks their canopies. The stone and soft black earth of the forest floor are covered in bright green moss. Quick, clear, cold streams of sweet, drinkable water run through the territory and occasionally converge into small ponds and water meadows. 

This part of the forest is infested. For each day you travel through it, you have a 1 in 2 chance of coming across 2d10 Worms. If you do encounter them, they have an additional 1 in 2 chance of being accompanied by a Warrior. 

THE BLISTER EXTERIOR

When you arrive, it will be at a natural low-point in the local elevation, a sort of sump. At the centre of the depression is a wide earth 'bubble' about 6 feet at its tallest point, and maybe 50ft in diameter. It is broken at the top by a circular cavity 30ft wide, which has an ancient and decomposing timber scaffold built around it. 

This depression in the earth is a natural sump. Two small streams lead down into it and have collected around the base of the blister, before escaping at the other side of the clearing and continuing as a single, larger channel. The earth at the bottom of the depression is waterlogged and very difficult to move through. Sprinting is impossible, and anything faster than a careful, focused slow walk has a 1 in 6 chance of trapping your foot and sending you prone into the filth. 

Inside and around this scaffold structure there are 4d10 Worms, lying prone and immobile. If you approach within 10ft of one of them, all will rise and attack you at once. They move on all fours, or with and odd slithering of the body, but will be hampered as normal by the difficult, marshy ground.

THE SCAFFOLD AND THE SHAFT

The wooden scaffolding around the mouth of the shaft is very old, very rotten, and very dangerous. It appears to have once been built as a pulley system, probably to hoist something up from (or lower something down into) the depths, but the taller armatures have collapsed. The broad wooden platform is wet, rotten, and very slippery (no movement faster than a walk, auto fail on checks to trip or avoid being moved against your will). There are sections that are obviously, visibly unstable. If you move onto these for any reason, you have a 1 in 3 three chance of falling through. If you are over the platforms that lead down into the shaft, this will only be a 10ft fall. If you are over the shaft itself, it is a 150ft fall. 

The scaffold structure continues down into the shaft as a series of landings and ladders, built along its edge and fastened with rotting iron brackets and fixings hammered directly into its walls. The shaft itself is perfectly circular, and carved directly into rock by unclear means. The scaffold is the only way to descend.  

There are fifteen of these timber landings before you come to the Antechamber, spaced at 10ft intervals. The three closest to the top are unstable enough that they provoke a structural integrity check, exactly as the unstable sections of the originary platform do. If they collapse under you you have a 5 in 6 chance of hitting the next platform, 10ft below you, and a 1 in 6 chance of falling down the shaft itself, which is 150ft deep. The platforms further down are not as wet, and are basically sturdy. 

THE INTERIOR

The entire interior of the Blister counts as dungeon depth 2. Adventurers will be aware that they are crossing into a place of evil as they descend the scaffold. 

The entire interior is pitch black unless otherwise indicated. It smells awful; mostly like rotten meat and black mould, and sometimes like burning plastic. All walls are stone, and, like the shaft, seems to have been bored or cut from the rock without the aid of mechanical tools. The doors are iron, and unlocked. 

Once in the Antechamber and beyond, you must make a roll on the following table for each thirty minute interval you spending exploring, or whenever you make a loud noise. 

• 1-8: Silence, the smells of mould and rotting meat, thick, fetid air. 
• 9-14: Strangely distorted howling from the blackness ahead. It goes on for longer than you expect. Further rolls on this table are at +2. 
• 15-17: A strange, pallid, elongated shape stumbles out of the darkness. You are discovered by one of the Moon-Rotted Soldiers. 
• 18-19: Awful staccato howls and buzzing snarls precede them! d2+1 Moon-Rotted Soldiers run straight at you from out of the blackness. 
• 20: The Pallid Amalgam has found you and attacks in silence. If it has been slain, then nothing. 
• 21+: d6 coiling, twisting Bright Shadows begin to form in the room. The sound is deafening and awful. It has become aware of your presence. Further rolls on this table are at +2. 

Click to make it clearer!

ROOMS

1. Antechamber. The wooden scaffold descends into this room. It is bare, but for a large iron 'cradle' or holding structure in the centre. The floor is covered in mud, water, and filth which has entered through the open shaft and has nowhere to drain - it is slippery in the same way as the rotted wooden scaffold. It is also completely covered in large shards of dirty broken glass. If you fall prone or attempt to grapple in this room, you will take d3 slashing damage, with a -2 (minimum 0) if you are wearing heavy armour. If, for some reason, you are without shoes, you will take d6 slashing damage each turn you spend moving across the floor
2. Storage/Waste. This room smells even worse than the rest of the complex. Iron shelving lines the walls, stocked with rotten sacks of food, and wooden crates filled with various supplies. Everything is falling apart and unusable. The two large pits descend about 100ft further into the earth, and each filled with roughly 10ft of putrefying waste at the bottom. The Pallid Amalgam is in the southern pit if you haven't already encountered it, and will climb to the top if it sees light or hears movement. It will take it about two minutes to do so, after which it will begin actively hunting you through the complex. 
3. Lens Store. Iron shelving housing hundreds of lenses, from 10cm to 1m in diameter. two thirds of them have been smashed, and the floor is covered in broken glass, exactly as described in the Antechamber. The lenses are finely made (though extremely fragile), and would be worth between 50s and 500s depending on the size. There are 5d10, of various sizes, left in salvageable condition. 
4. Barracks. Triple layers of iron bunks, pushed against both walls, with a third row running down the centre of the room. Extremely cramped, but could sleep thirty. There are d6 Moon-Rotted Soldiers in here; they have been trying to fall asleep for a very long time. 
5. Recreation/Mess. Iron tables and chairs, a large potbellied stove. The chimney empties into the room and there would be nowhere for the smoke to go. There are six strange, iron paintings on the walls - each is a sheet of iron featuring a finely-painted landscape in ghostly, pearlescent white. They are extremely heavy and unwieldy, but would be objects of major curiosity in the capital, each worth 600s. The Science Officer is here, sitting unnaturally rigid and still in front of the largest painting and wailing softly to himself. 
6. Overseer. A more comfortable living quarters, with the furnishing in iron. A large bed, a desk, a wardrobe. If you open the door and shine light inside, a seething black mass of insects and vermicular vermin will flood out towards you, startled by the light and seeking any shelter they can. Hung on the wall is a rotten steel rapier (breaks on a crit or a crit miss), and a non-functional musket. Lying on the table is a lockbox (not locked) with 16 strange gold coins in it, each worth 80s in the capital. The coins are large, flat, circular, and decorated with geometric abstractions - no one in the capital will be able to identify their provenance. The box also containers The Vivisector, a small prism apparently made from the glass. 
7. Machinery. This room is filled with large banks of iron machinery of unclear purpose. Most of it has been built on rollers that run on tracks laid east to west, for the length of the room. The mechanisms are rusted and rotted together and large pieces can be pulled off or broken apart by hand. The rust will stain the skin red for weeks. Hundreds of thousands of strange white worms about the size of a finger have made their home in the rusted-out hulks, if they are exposed they will try to burrow back into the rust. Many of the machines feature lenses like those in the lens storage, and the floor here is covered in broken glass, with the same mechanical effects. 
8. Array. Mirrors or enormous size line the walls of this chamber. They are tarnished and awful, and show hideous reflections. Entities of all kinds will refuse to enter of be summoned into this room. Light shined here will be 5 times brighter than otherwise; a single torch will strongly illuminate the room. In darkness, you will see the silver glow of moonlight coming from the passage to the east. 
9. Chamber of the Lunar Mimic. A large bare stone room. Unlike the rest of the complex, this room is brightly lit with silver moonlight. The light emanates from a large stone and iron mass at the centre of the room. It has rotted in on itself, and currently bathes only the eastern half of the room in its light. This is the Lunar Mimic, which fell from the upper firmament at this location almost 40 years ago. The Mimic is mounted on a circular iron platform which is mounted on bearings and can be rotated by hand. The mechanism is rusted and stiff, and this will take a combined strength score of 30 to achieve. If you can rotate it, then you can direct the 180 degree projection of rotting moonlight from its surface. See below for the effects. If the rotting moonlight is directed along the western passageway and into the Array, that entire room will be filled with it immediately. Kneeling in the middle of the moonlight at the eastern wall is a tall and unnatural-looking figure dressed in strange armour, and apparently offering its sword in service to the Lunar Mimic. The armour is iron, undecorated, and segmented in strange places. The figure is very thin, around 9 feet tall, and utterly still. The sword is the Lunar Guillotine. If investigated, the armour will prove to be empty, save for a colony of thin, pale centipedes living in the helmet. 

ROTTING MOONLIGHT

Rotting moonlight has the following effects on PCs: each turn of exposure does d3 radiation damage. Each turn of exposure past the first does d2 INT and WIS damage. Each turn of exposure past the second permanently disables a random limb: 1: arm, 2: leg: 3: torso (-6 CON), 4: head (50/50 chance of permanent blindness and deafness, or death). These effects stack. All enemies in this dungeon (except Bright Shadows, who are unaffected) will flee from rotting moonlight above all other priorities. If they are somehow trapped in the light, they will curl into a ball and scream, before dying d3 turns later. 

BESTIARY

• Moon-Rotted Soldiers. Human bodies that have been horribly twisted, as though a second form were pushing its way out of them. This second thing is a weird mix of wolf and insect; toothed jaws, compound eyes, cutting limbs, fur and chiton. No two soldiers look identical. They are large, strong, fast, and hostile, and some still carry their old human arms and armour - practical plates of iron, and short swords designed for stabbing at close quarters. HD3, claws/jaws/blades (d4 slashing x2), armour: 2 in 3 unarmoured, 1 in 3 armour as chain, speed: as human, disposition: trapped in a nightmare. They don't speak your language, but if you show them human kindness there is a 50 percent chance they will become non-hostile and simply weep. In this state, they will not stop you from killing them. 
• Pallid Amalgam. A mess of grown together waste, vermin, and moon-rotted bodies. No memory at all of the people that it used to be. Very large, slow, patient, and quiet. Terribly terribly strong. Its body is infested with insects and other vermin who attack anyone who comes near it. HD6, tearing limbs (d8 x3), armour as leather, speed: walking speed, but utterly silent and can climb sheer surfaces and ceilings as spider climb, disposition: territorial and without the capacity for complex thought. Anyone in melee combat with the Pallid Amalgam will take 1 damage per turn from the seething, biting vermin that scuttle out from its form. If you are in either Machinery or Overseer, the additional vermin present mean that everyone in the room takes this damage, regardless of their position relative to the Amalgam. 
• Science Officer. A strangely elongated, moon-rotted human, wearing a suit of oddly segmented iron armour. Its head has been replaced with a strange fleshy flower-like protrusion, whose 'petals' are usually closed. In combat, the flower will open and shine rotting moonlight in a 90 degree cone in front of it. HD4, fists (d3), armour: as plate, speed: as human, disposition: trapped in a nightmare. It doesn't speak your language, but if you show it human kindness there is a 50 percent chance it will become non-hostile and simply weep. In this state, its 'flower' will close, and it will not stop you from killing it. On its body are 10 golden coins worth 80s each (identical to those in Overseer), and a strange golden charm, with a eyelet to allow it to be worn around the neck, which looks like a flayed human curled into a foetal position, with two large wings growing from its shoulder-blades. It is not magical, but will absolutely confound the historians and specialists of the capital. It is worth 800s to a specialist buyer. 
• Bright Shadows. Swirling human-ish manifestations of bright silver light, the painful expressions of a trapped and degraded consciousness that was never supposed to be cut away from the open sky. The shadows are tall and elongated, and when they appear they emit a horribly loud and distorted screaming that cuts into the brain like a saw blade. They have a single point of HP, and can be dispersed like smoke. HD.5 (1 hp), claws of light (no damage, but each hit counts as a single round of exposure to rotting moonlight, which stacks if more than one Shadow hits the same target in a single turn), armour: unarmoured, speed: twice human, they flicker in and out of existence as they move, disposition: they want to hurt you. Horrible Screaming: everyone in the room takes 1 point of fear damage per Shadow in the same room as them at the start of their turn. 

MAGIC ITEMS

• The Vivisector. A small prism made from glass. If held up to sunlight, moonlight, or starlight, it will refract the rays into cutting blades. These are difficult to angle properly, and roll to hit as a bow with an additional -1. If the rays hit, they have the following effects. Full Moonlight: d3 damage, anyone who suffers damage must roll morale. Weak Moonlight: d3 damage. Strong Starlight: d4 damage, and 1 permanent INT damage. Strong Sunlight: d10 damage. Weak Sunlight: d4 damage. If the Vivisector is used to refract sunlight of any kind, it takes 1 damage. It has 5 hp, and if it is reduced to zero it explodes, doing d6 heated glass damage to everyone within 15ft. 
• Lunar Guillotine. A large moon-rotted sword with a flat, square blade. Counts as a great sword that takes an additional slot to carry, has +1 damage and -1 to hit, and always crits prone enemies. If the Lunar Guillotine is used to kill someone in the Dreamlands, they die in the waking world.

 

Sunlight

The sun and its kindness, the joy that it brings. 

When it sets into the sea it lights the mirrored surface red and golden and gives that body of water its name; the colours are blood, fire, and burnished metal. When it sets it is the colour of the inflamed heart. It opens you up to nostalgia, to faces from before, when you were more capable of kindness, before your hope was poisoned. People who loved you and who you could not keep at your side. Easier years. 

Or the colour of the sunset in the water like fire is the best of you and the others of your city. It is civic pride in independence, the bravery that you feel in common, the knowledge that you will stand together when called by your captain to the muster. The glory of it, to have bent to the struggle and triumphed. Young, strong bodies clutching the tools of their profession; faces that are weary with the work but smiling, unbowed. No room for fear in this place. That may come, but it will be later, when the sun has disappeared, when the sureties have all fallen away. Illness and fear and the death of duty. All of them are in the future and nothing to worry about now.

Or it is the peace of your soul when the sun seems to light a place for you - when things are not so quiet inside, and the world can meet you with all of its infinite serried power and deign not to destroy you - when your strength, so little that you are almost nothing, but it is everything that you are, all of your pain and happiness, all of it is matched against the colour of the sun on the waves and the sound of the sea - matched to that light like blood and fire and burnished metal, and held in it, static, with infinite compassion, until you choose to leave.

That is the sun on the sea at the end of the day. 

In the Barony people know that the sunlight is hazy. There is a dreaming edge to its heat and its golden light. In the morning it carves out the small spaces for animals in the undergrowth, it allows for hiding, and it covers the moving undergrowth and the canopies of the trees without prejudice - unilateral and universal colour of light gold in the mornings when the sky is still nearly purple with its glowing awake and there is mist on the ground and the leaves are brightly verdant, bursting and pushing up and over themselves from the earth and the cracks in old walls. 

Bushes of brambles everywhere in the Barony. They overgrow the ruins and hem the forest paths and grow in vast copses and beds in the open country, the bushes as tall as a man, impenetrable without a heavy knife and a good pair of gloves. There are beloved by the populace. Rough, rugged, thorned, wild, joyous. The sunlight makes them beautiful. 

When the light bounces from the clouds it seem to soften them and bring them into slow communication with the other substrates of earth, open sky, all of them coloured by the sun into bands of gold, purple, soft blues, whites, browns in the evening, coming together to enclose you and to make for the eye a coherent frame. The substrate of the dreaming. You can draw onto it. The forest contains the faces that you see there. There are voices that will speak back to you about your appreciation of the water and light. When you tell stories to your friends or your children they will carry them forwards, into the sunlight, and into the bowers that you can bend out from its territory. 

They call it a sickness, this disappearing into dreams and stories and soft language and the shifting and softening of light inside the eye. The order of the gaze, its structures and its hierarchies, and their disordering in time, their happy dissolution. Haze and smoke and wind and the shadows growing into one another until the wood is no longer an intelligible thing. You should have been home hours ago. Dreams are also dangerous. 

Further south the sunlight gets harder, colder, and very bright. The air is frigid and clear, and you can pick the details of things - blades of grass, the harnessing and gear of the others with you, their wide smiles, the subtle shifts of expression. Horses sweating. The night when it comes is all-at-once. The grasslands dwindle and obscure before you and then it is night. The mornings are the same way - a fire on the horizon, slow percolation of grey into the midnight sheaf of stars above you, then blue earth, then the fire of the solar disk, and what seems like seconds afterwards that hard, white light that shows you yourself in the world. 

In the south you can hold two things in relation, and see them organised this way, in their specificities. There is no need to worry that one thing might become another, no need to worry about slipping by soft degree into dream. If the light has a character it is lucid, calm, cool, slightly detached, arranged in solitude, and then arranged again (by units) into the clans of family, village, kingdom, army. You can speak in your own name and be heard. There will be time given to the response. You can pick the quarry from the ground at a distance of many miles. It is hard to hide, from others and from yourself. 

The openness of the heart beneath sunlight like this is known to be addictive and many Baronials travel south and never recover their love of soft enclosure, of hazy mornings and the uncertainty that nests in the eye. 

Still further south that lucidity breeds a type of madness. It is so white and bright that it reveals the world in harsh binaries: black and white, shadow and sun - or, perhaps more accurate: in WHITE, the light of the sun, and in BLACK, which is really all colours, and looks sometimes blue, sometimes red, sometimes brown, sometimes purple. All things are in relation to the WHITE sunlight that picks out all details from obscurity and that lets nothing stay hidden. They say that the sun can burn in the sky for months at a time and that its burning kills people and animals - they go mad or they die from fear or from exposure. 

North of the Barony things are different again. In the cities there, the gold colours are offset with the vibrant blue of the water, the white of salt flats, of bleached linen, the yellow of stone, the red of dust. Bodies are burned brown. Teeth are eyes are bright and smiling, people sweat, and when they make their marks and their images the colours are bright and stained as if for all time - although they are the most transitory of things, they will be replaced tomorrow, it is their character, when made well, to seem as though they will endure. There is great laziness and great activity, sometime in the same day, sometimes in the same body at the same time. The categories are confused. Cool wind blows through the empty windows of the white stone apartments and softly moves the thin cotton walls within. The breeze cools the heat of the day. The sun bakes the rest into dust. The streets are carved with wide central channels for rain and blood. The people there drink white spirits and eat fish and meat rubbed with salt. Personal and public are the same thing; every house and every hovel has its public space. People take the time that they need and then they put their projects in motion. 

If you had to talk about the colours of the sun you might talk again of burnished metal, but it would be the glinting of steel, perhaps a sheaf of hammered bronze. The colours of dust and the white facades scrubbed clean. The deep turquoise of the water that is clear where the light falls through it, which you can see down, and where the people of the city go swimming for mussels or to escape from the afternoon heat. Coloured sails in the harbours. Flags of all types. The people also wear flags. Each is rendered nearly non-representing, not for lack of trying, but because of the clangour of their mutual contamination. 

Further north again and the dream comes back stronger; this time it is a killing dream. There are no longer firm boundaries between the lake and the shore, between undergrowth and earth beneath it, between trees and the things that live in them; there is a single chaos of steam and stench and plant life and boiling water. The bodies that emerge from it are nightmares. The sun is sticky and orange-yellow-green. It is blue-white. It gets into your skin and stays there for days after you leave. The air is like water. The light that falls through it is like water. Its dynamics are strangely fluid, or somehow adjacent to steam. Boiling light that smothers you and burns you and drowns you. At the end of it the sun is in the lakes; it is the sunlight that boils them. How many suns? They are refracted, infinite. They find you wherever you lie; however you position yourself the boiling light will enter at the eye and drive you mad. Buzzing insects the size of people, people the size of towers, lakes as big as the world, boiling, sun-drenched, lit from beneath, the rays escaping as steam to rejoin the sky. The sky is steam, smoke, forever-storms, rain that also boils you, that also carries the light.

It is the colours of the sun that will bring you to your part in the dream of your life.