The Third City

 

Far to the north of the Imperial territory, jutting out from the crimson alkaline shore of the northern sea and near to the impassable boiling jungles at the world's terminus, stands the ancient city of Rantine. It is called the Third City in official accounts, and, with varying degrees of disdain, 'The Exception' by Imperial subjects. To date it is the only state to have survived White City diplomacy with its political independence intact since the first Imperial campaigns of annihilation, nearly three hundred years ago. 

Rantine is large and populous, and very old. The architecture is quite unlike that found in the White City - the Rantines build in wood as much as stone, and they favour courtyards, one and two-story buildings, shadowed interiors, dark-tinted mirrors, and painted walls. It is called the Third City because in centuries past it was one of the three peer states that vied for supremacy in the region, alongside what is now the White City, and what was then the Old Capital. 

Rantine of old was a competing culture to those others. Its people were famous for producing and exporting dyes, fine lace, carved and treated wood, silk, and iron and brass mechanisms of great complexity and ingenuity. They kept a fearsome military, built around massed bombards and sophisticated rocketry, highly trained and disciplined infantry, and a famously pious noble caste of priests, officers, and administrators, known for their cultivation of miraculous, healing blood, and for the linked practices of blood-drinking and exsanguination on the battlefield.

Rantines are physically tall and bright-eyed, with pronounced features and especially large teeth and eyes. They will tell you that they are descended from the giants of the north. To their southern neighbours they are known as aggressive, loud, laughing, sexually crude, loyal to their friends and lovers, astutely observant, and impossible to lie to. They still file their teeth and dress in lace, and they still attach long streamers of coloured fabric to their limbs when they dance, although no longer when they go to war, because the Rantines have not fought a battle in centuries. Once a year the Great Bombard fires a blank charge, and once a year the 'army' holds a parade, during which the seven remaining 'Colour Exemplars' dress in their ancient harness and perform public displays of their martial and acrobatic skill. All of this is done to signal the exceptional status of the city, its defanged and neutered autonomy beneath the Damocles sword of the 'friendly' garrison of Imperial soldiery. 

The Promise

The Rantine pacification was the first major campaign that the White City fought during its ascendant rise from regional- to super-power status, three centuries ago. The modern Imperial war machine did not exist at the time, and the invasion forces were mostly comprised of drugged and surgically-treated 'myrmidon' citizen-soldiers, shod in bronze and fighting with heavy spears. The campaigns to subdue the Rantine were bloody and attritional - the two cities had been variously allies and enemies of convenience for as long as either could remember, but neither had ever seriously considered extinguishing the other permanently. Something changed at the moment that the White City military were, after decades of war, able to finally destroy the famous Rantine city walls - they were suddenly thrust into the novel position of dictating terms with total impunity. 

The king of the pre-imperial White City found himself unable to order their extermination - there was too much shared cultural history, and too much mutual understanding. The famous Image Game, which would be developed over the centuries of warfare that followed, is said to have its genesis in a Rantine board game played with glass beads, and popular in the White City at the time. He decreed instead that the Rantine nobility would govern independently, as the 'special friends' of their conquerors, and then organised a series of brutal purges in the military leadership, the complete disbanding of the Rantine army, and the crowning of a new and pliant puppet-king. This state of affairs has continued to the present day. 

Rantine of the present is a city held in a curious state of suspended animation. The political machinery is guaranteed by a foreign military, and all essential foreign policy decisions are made by the White City. Internally, the celebration of Rantine culture has taken on a sort of existential importance for certain elements in the city, and the old forms and rituals, which once formed a proud, vital, and living cultural practice, have been exaggerated in a vacuum, for effect. A large part of the economy of the city centres on the performance of this trapped/dead culture for curious onlookers from elsewhere in the empire - the dances, the blood-drinking, the rocketry, the elaborately layered lace clothing. 

Beneath this gaudy performativity, Rantine is a wealthy and often-idle city. It is 'kept' by the Empire as proof positive of Imperial tolerance, and as such its populace live mostly comfortable lives, free of the labour expectations of other Imperial subjects. The weather this far north is unbearably hot for much of the year, and at the peak of the summer months the dead, ultra-saline, crimson sea begins to smoke and burn, releasing a smothering stench that burns the eyes and throat. The red sunlight brings strange dreams; makes one loud, laughing, blunt, aggressive, sexually crude. The city is the only place in the Empire where Imperial law technically has no jurisdiction, and for this reason its sprawling districts are often used as safe-houses or staging points for Flare Children and other anti-Imperial elements. This concentration naturally leads to a high number of anti-insurgent and other irregular Imperials making their base in the city, and in the Empire it is said that the Rantine bathhouses host more spies, agents, desperadoes, revolutionaries, and thief-catchers than they do Rantine civilians. 

The Queen

The current queen of Rantine is named Sysophene. She is fourteen years old, and by all accounts a shrewd and capable administrator, and a good friend to the Empire. She is around six feet tall, with the socially required over-large eyes, long fingers, and thin, wide lips. She dresses in the formal Rantine style of the old aristocracy (white lace, since it is peacetime, built out to cover the whole of the body) and has had her teeth and fingernails replaced with white steel prosthetics. At fourteen years old she is also devoid of empathy, and monomaniacally dedicated to preserving the culture of her ancestors. Rantine blood-drinking is practised between noble worthies (they drink from one another), and on captives and criminals (all one way). Sysophene regularly organises elaborate blood feasts, exsanguinations, and public mutilations, and when she appears in public with her entourage she will endeavour to have the red-stained mouth, hands, and clothing that befit her station. 

Sysophene is also the secret carrier of a genuine miracle - the healing blood of the old aristocrats, thought to be extinct. She herself is unaware of this, because none of the nobles who have fed from her have been ill when they have done so. The discovery of the healing blood would be a political event of huge importance, and the Empire would work very hard to keep its existence a secret. 

If you were to somehow drink a litre or so of Sysophene's blood (this would take you a minute at minimum, unless you drink blood regularly), you would be healed to full HP and cured of all disease. If you were to do this every day for a week, you would regrow missing limbs and organs. If you let her drink your blood, she will bestow on you an ancient royal blessing, which no longer has any effect.  

The Rantine Nobility

The old ruling classes of the polis, now sadly reduced. They still practice blood-drinking, and many of them claim to keep the old martial traditions of the Colour Exemplars alive. Many now make their living showing curious citizens around their ancient estates, although some have also organised themselves into trading and export consortiums, and are fantastically wealthy as a result. There are various factions in the nobility, which mostly break down into two very broad camps: the modernists, who wish for a greater degree of cultural assimilation into the White City, and the traditionalists (who the White City supports indirectly) who wish to keep the ancient forms 'alive'. There are also those who argue for the rearming of the polis, and for a second independence, but they are not taken seriously by either their Rantine peers or the Imperial occupation. 

A Rantine noble is usually around seven feet tall, with the characteristic 'Rantine look'. A traditionalist will have tooth and nail prosthetics, designed to better facilitate blood-drinking. They will be dressed in layers of white lace, and will generally have an elaborate lace bonnet or hair piece to make their head look larger than it is. They carry the old weapons of office - the spiral swords and spiral spears - openly in public, and have the legal right to use them if offence is given. When they have committed themselves to some deed or course of action, or when they dance, they will strip away their many layers of lace until all that remains are simple cotton wraps around the genitals and waist, and then tie off their limbs with coloured streamers which float behind them as they move. 

Spiral swords and spiral spears are simply medium swords and heavy spears whose strange design means that class proficiencies do not apply to them. 

The Rantine Mob

The population of Rantine are famously politically involved, hot-tempered, proud, and dangerous. When the city was first subdued, the White City took almost as many casualties in the sacking of the city as it did in the field battles outside its walls. Many royal lines and noble houses have been cut short by armed bands breaking into their estates and putting them 'on display' - a Rantine term for public hanging, crucifixion, or disembowelment. The mob are capricious, but in general they are: patriotic, jealous of their privileges, and concerned with taxation and the cost of living. They will assassinate nobles who they perceive as being insufficiently traditionalist, or unfair or cruel to their workers. They will sometimes even kill Imperials, which always causes a minor diplomatic incident - they are very difficult to effectively police. 

Various institutions have formed around the mob and its vagaries. Semi-professional fighters and demagogues who cultivate factional sway are known as Juggers, and they can be hired to keep you safe, or to prosecute your enemies, if you know how to contact them. Many nobles keep a small staff of Juggers on retainer, to give advance warning of flash points that might erupt, and to keep the pulse of the streets. There are also complex local laws around the right to build and maintain walls, which can make a noble house difficult for the mob to storm - the legal right is generally extended and retracted by the queen and her advisors, and there are gradations of wall-right. Architects of complex crowd-dispersing traps and other anti-intruder contrivances make good money in Rantine, especially when the price of bread looks like it might increase. 

The Rantine mob have stats as commoners, and fight with crude wooden cudgels, garrottes and binding ropes, glass knives, and sometimes with paving stones, roofing tiles, and other improvised weapons of convenience. They wear wooden and paper masks when they organise their pogroms, and will often try to burn down buildings with their quarries inside. When there are least 100 of them fighting, they are fearless until fifty percent of them have been killed, after which they automatically break and flee. 

A glass knife is a light weapon that inflicts damage on both the target and the wielder on a critical miss. On a critical hit, the blade breaks off inside the target, and will deal d6 damage per turn it remains embedded if the target moves or takes an action. It takes one turn of fishing around in your guts to remove the shard, which also deals d6 damage.  

A Rantine Jugger is HD2, masked and armoured as leather, and armed with a sword or spear and a pistol. They will not engage in combat with the mob that they lead if they can avoid it. They all have an excellent sense of crowd psychology, rhetoric, when and who to bribe, and in what quanitites. A Jugger will generally keep a small retinue of experienced street fighters with them day-to-day, and all of them have connections in the nobility. 

The Protectors of the Polis

One of the sadder spectacles of the city - the Protectors of the Polis, also known as the Colour Exemplars, are what remains of the ancient Rantine army, once feared by all. They are seven men and women who dress in brightly coloured mail, tie their limbs off with streamers, and leap and dance with their ancient spiral-spears in the city squares. The old martial techniques are very visually impressive, although some historians will tell you that what was once a murderously effective martial art has been almost entirely supplanted by a series of stylish flourishes of no real use of the battlefield. 

Once a year the protectors are fed the blood of Queen Sysophene in a great public ceremony, and each is sworn anew to defend the ancient rampart - a fortification that was never rebuilt after the first conquest. 

If it ever comes to it, the Protectors have stats as men-at-arms, and are armoured in chain and armed with heavy spiral spears. They are capable of great leaps and bounds - twice that of a normal man - and take half damage from falling. 

If all seven fight you at once (each has their own colour), something of their ancient dignity returns, and each receives an extra attack and an extra HD for the fight. 

The Great Bombard

The Great Bombard is an enormous iron siege cannon, a relic of the centuries-long Rantine supremacy in siegecraft. It was once a wonder and terror of the whole world, and the Rantines used its fearsome reputation to force the surrender of competitor cities without spending the lives of their soldiers. The cannon and rockets of the White City have long since outstripped those of the Rantine (indeed the Imperial models were built with the expertise of their ancient foes), but the Great Bombard is still fired once a year, in celebration of independence. 

The iron chasis is nearly three times the size of the buildings that surround it. They don't make shells for it any more, but if you could find something to load it with, and sufficient powder, you could fire iron shot to a range of three hexes distant, with good accuracy. 

The Beast of Rantine

During the so called 'highest summer', when the crimson sea smokes and boils, the citizens of Rantine find their dreams invaded by ancient lethargies, and by a terrible inhuman anger. In this period the nobles drink blood and eat offal to hold the weird blackness away, and the poorer workers withdraw from the streets, into shadowed interior rooms and the reflections of black mirrors, to wait the season out. 

During the highest summer something haunts the nighted streets of the city - something that tears its victims to ribbons and screams, high and horrible. It sings too, it the same high and awful voice, the ancient battle songs of the old royalty. Those who have seen it describe as something like a giant: a great man-like beast, covered head to toe in wet and shining gore, wrapped in bloody coloured rags, with long steel teeth and steel claws, and staring eyes, filled with fear and confusion. It is said to hunt those that are insufficiently loyal to the queen, but sober analysis of victim patterns shows little support for this. Many have hunted the beast, and many have claimed to have killed it, but none have ever been able to display the corpse, and the killings continue. 

The Beast of Rantine

HD6, armour as chain (blood slick, oddly tough hide, pain tolerance), 2x steel claws as heavy weapons + steel bite as vorpal heavy weapon, speed on all fours: as horse, speed on two feet: as human, disposition: screaming, vengeful spirit, will kill anyone it encounters. 

If the Beast of Rantine is killed, it comes apart in a fountain of blood and is reborn at the next highest summer. 

The Oubliette and the Iron Mask

The dungeons below the palace of Queen Sysophene and not often full - criminals are more usually drained or executed than held in detention. There is a single exception. A woman of about the queen's age, kept in a state of squalor in a lightless room, with an iron mask clamped over her face such that none might see her face. 

This miserable prisoner does not know why she is held, and has no memory of any other place. She eats when she is fed, and sleeps, and amuses herself as best she can. 

When she sleeps, and the air is heavy and foul with the reek of the sea, and the sunlight that she cannot see falls red and black over the ancient city, she dreams of the streets above, which she will never see again. She dreams of nobility and impunity, of a terrible body, slick with the blood of her subjects, of steel claws and steel teeth, and of a dynasty birthed in creation of the world. 

If you were to somehow drink the blood of this prisoner - a litre or so would do it - you would be healed to full HP and cured of all disease. If you were to do this every day for a week, you would regrow missing limbs and organs. 

Additionally, if you give her your blood to drink, she will, with ancient words she does not understand, give you her royal blessing: a terrible, burning vitality that manifests in a brightness of the eye, growth of about a foot in height, and dreams of black, reeking smoke on the surface of the sea, calm like a sheet of glass, of dark mirrors and coloured glass beads, of rockets tracing their arcs of fire across the skies of battlefields and charnel houses, of red, terrible sunlight: in game terms, you gain +d6 max HP. 

Folk Hero Redux

 

The Flare Children of the Imperial hinterlands wage a thankless, bloody, and unending insurgency against the soldiery of the White City. Most were born under occupation and have no personal experience of anything else, but they all grow up nurtured by stories of the cities and cultures that have been so violently denied them, and of the great and undefeated heroes who have fought and died to keep their memory and their dignity aflame. 

Folk Hero

You are an insurrectionist and captain of the hundred million doomed children of the hinterland. You have more experience of war and its horrors than most mercenaries, and have been actively hunted by the Pragmatists from the moment you became a symbol to others like you. On bad days you cannot tell if your memories of the city of your birth are real or fabulated. 

Skills: one civilian trade (what you did when you had a life outside the forever war), one choice and one roll on the Dead Cultures Matrix abilities table - if your abilities have rules appropriate for NPC allies but not PCs your DM will come up with something appropriate. 

Gear: nondescript clothing, light weapon that conceals well, identity documents for three distinct aliases, one choice on the Dead Cultures Matrix gear table - if your gear has rules appropriate for NPC allies but not PCs your DM will come up with something appropriate.

A - Natural Selection, Tradecraft, Black Mirrors, Raider Captain
B - Lobster Cracking
C - Now and Forever
D - One Life

Natural Selection: Millions of people like you have contested the City and died badly for it. You are the product of pressures and hostilities unimaginable even to most professional soldiers. You have +1 to all derived stats, and are immune to fear damage. 

Tradecraft: You can move silently, avoid notice in a crowd, and forge documents.

Black Mirrors: You are immune to any and all mental effects produced by the cultural apparatus of the White City. You can choose to take either -2 or +2 to reaction rolls with White Citizens or their military. You are resistant to poison and radiation, and can choose to make saves against psychoactive and chemical compounds with advantage. You may also choose one of the following skills: mathematics, logistics, chemistry, the Image Game, poisons, ignoble murder (+d8 damage against in melee against enemies who are unaware of your presence). 

Raider Captain: Hirelings and other followers get a +1 bonus to their morale while you lead them. If they are fighting for reasons other than pay, this is instead +[templates]. On a surprise round, you and [templates] hirelings under your command attack twice in melee. 

Lobster Cracking: You may choose for your melee attacks to ignore armour (hit against AC10), or to reduce an enemy's AC by 1/2/3 if light/medium/heavy, to a minimum of 10, on a hit - choose which before you roll. Your crits destroy armour, appropriate to your weapon size, one additional time, regardless of which of these options you choose. 

Now and Forever: You are joined by a young Flare Child retainer, who is perfectly loyal and who trusts you with their life. If you die, they immediately gain their A template in Folk Hero, and your gear (if appropriate to the circumstances of your death). If you want them to, they can also gain your name and heroic reputation, Dread Pirate Roberts style. 

One Life: Your dignity is unimpeachable, and your cold and bottomless hatred is supplemented by an unassailable reserve of calm. You can choose to be unaffected by pain, which gives you +1 damage resistance against all physical damage, and makes you immune to torture. You are also immune to mental effects of all kinds, unless you wish it otherwise. Once ever, if you die, you can instead choose to survive with 0 hp. The City will fall.

The Imagoes

 

Trace a line in the shape of a human body. Generally they are life-sized or slightly larger, but there is no firm rule. Compose its interior space with whatever you wish - what you use to compose the interior is of no importance whatever. If you trace the line on a brick wall, the interior space is composed in brick. If you bring flowers to decorate the surface, the interior space is composed in flowers on brick. If you smear it with shit or with quicklime, if you put down wire inside it, if you paint the interior surface in bright colours - none of this is important. Then you erase the line.

The imagoes are bad omens, and can be dangerous. People shouldn't make them, but they sometimes do. Sometimes the process doesn't work (it is not clear why), but when it does the number of imagoes in the world increases by one, and, as far as anyone knows, this number never drops. 

You would see a shape on the wall, or against the sky, or in the rock wall of a cave, layered across the bad surface of the wild grass on the hill - the shape is of a human, and its interior space will show some other surface, irregular, not congruent with its surroundings. A patch of brick in the sky, of stone on the surface of the sea, of flowers and softly curling spring leaves on a sheet of perfect glass. They move about, change their postures, appear and disappear, when no one can see them. If you look at them you get an odd vertigo; something like seeing paintings in caves from tens of thousands of years ago. Or maybe something like seeing the dead body of someone you knew in life, reduced to object-hood. Or like looking up into the sky and feeling yourself oddly vulnerable to its monumental scale - not only the sheet of blue, but the freezing volume of vacuum that it covers. 

There are more of them underground than there are on the surface. They appear to be very old - cryptic references to the imagoes can be found throughout recorded history. The tracing around the body can be done as well with a stick of charcoal as it can with a freshly cut pen-tip. 

If you can see an imago, you have CHAR mod rounds (min 0) before it starts doing permanent damage. Once this process begins, you test CHAR every round you are exposed, or permanently lose 1 from each of your mental stats for each failure. Closing your eyes or looking away protects you. If you touch the surface of an imago, you lose (or it steals) one point of max HP per turn with no save. 

Everyone knows not to look at, touch, or acknowledge imagoes. The polite thing to do is to turn your back, and pretend that the thing is not there. Maybe, when you turn back around, it will be gone. 

Some Postural Diagrams

Yesterday I put together some preparatory diagrams for the Image Game, working through the basic 'loop' of play, in terms of the selection, synthesising, and deployment of images. This resulted in some excellent stress testing in the glog server, as well as a good deal of spirited play between the worthies. 

This is turn got me thinking about the postures of the game - the building blocks that players internalise (usually as children), and which constitute its semi-formal 'grammar'. There are basic postures and advanced postures, as detailed below. 

The most important posture is also the most fundamental and straight forward. An image makes a claim (the claim can be just about anything), and a second adversarial image attempts to deconstruct or nullify that claim. Crudely, it might match or cancel a claim, but what players really want to do if show that a claim was always actually something else, ideally its opposite. 

This sounds complicated, but it's a common critical posture in our own academic/theoretical and contemporary art cultures - it's the reason many 20th century theorists are so obsessed with the rhetorical form that asserts that something is both x and not x. It is a very powerful critical move to assert this convincingly, because it puts the reader (or your adversary, if you're a Citizen) in the position of trying to work your apparently contradictory position out from first principles, ie they must demonstrate that they are already behind you. 

A claim of this kind can (and nearly always does) have content; it is not only a formal stance or posture, and is contingent on what it actually advances - nonetheless, the postural flex or terror move of asserting that something is both x and not x cannot only be understood in terms of content. 

I am not claiming (and do not believe) that these assertions are vapid or cynical - critical writing that advances past a certain threshold of abstraction often needs to invent concepts and small, contingent language games to get at its object. I likewise do not think of the Image Game as vapid or cynical (you might have a different opinion); it is imagined as a complex cultural artefact that serves a social function, but which also gives its players (the entire population of the Citizenry) a very dangerous set of critical/discursive tools that allows them to see 'around' and 'through' the cultural claims and norms of their subject states. Contemporary art training and practice is a complicated thing, tied into various colonial and class terror systems (see, as just one example among hundreds, the recent artwashing of the atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon), but also capable of producing images and concepts of great and lasting beauty. YYMV on whether you think that 'the production of images of great and lasting beauty' is encouraged or hindered by the labyrinthine critical and discursive machinery that has come to characterise the production of sophisticated contemporary art. 

So, what you are trying to do is assert your claim convincingly, such that your adversary (and any witnesses) say something like 'yes, that's true.' And what they are trying to do is advance their own position such that they demonstrate, convincingly, that your position was in fact analogous to their position all along, and to do this in a public setting, such that everyone else knows it, and back and forth it goes.  

More diagrams!

Some Diagrams for the Image Game

I get asked about the Image Game more than any other thing in the setting, so thought I would have a go at making some diagrams mapping the process of play. Barony as a setting is quite often diagrammatically organised, and I would like to do more of these sometime where it makes sense. 

Postures and images are not 'empty' or arbitrary as they appear here, they do have content and can also advance claims of various kinds. There are relations that are obviously not possible. It is one of the 'goals' of play (insofar as you can talk about goals outside of regular adversarial play) to demonstrate that postures and images ARE arbitrary, that all lines of relation are eventually viable. This is impossible of course, but skilled players work to isolate those images that they believe cannot be reduced to a condition of arbitrariness, and then stress test them against one another.  

Returner Demons Redux

Once upon a time, I wrote about Returner Demons. Like the early Barony angels, I ended up not liking them much - they are too straight forward; their forwards movement through the timeline complicates the otherwise clean logics of temporal transference in the setting. 

Some truths about time travel:

• Only information travels, although 'information' can be complexly arranged into minds, which can remain coherent without bodies. As with Angel Eggs, there are materials in the present can be interfaced with by informational minds (or sub-minds and 'packets'). 
• Information has only ever been witnessed to travel from the future to the present. It is broadly assumed that this has been possible throughout history, and that as such can be assumed to have been taking place for an arbitrarily extensive period into the past. 
• God has, apparently, done things in the past. What this means for the canon setup, in which god is physically instantiated in the future, as a consequence of the directives of angels seeded back through the timeline, is debated. There are those who take is as a guarantee of god's victory over the its enemies (if it sends itself back, then of course it must be victorious in the future); there are those who argue that the 'god' of the making of the world was in fact some species of angel distinct only in relative power (these argue that the making of the world and the wars against chaos would have required vast expenditures of energy, and that as such it makes sense that the angels of the comparatively-tame present day are mundane in comparison); there are those who assert a cyclical structure of time, which begins anew with each instantiation, and which must then be safeguarded by the angels to ensure that the next 'cycle' takes place (this is heretical - if time is cyclical, then the Material Heaven is already-existing or finite); there are those who say that god's methods are mysterious and leave it at that (lots of these, including some in the clergy and the vast majority of the laity). 
• There has never been any definitive proof that travellers from the future are what they say they are. It is not clear what such a proof might look like. There are those who maintain that what the angels and demons mean when they use the word 'future' is something completely other, which no direct relation to time as it is experienced by humans. What has been proven is that all such travellers believe themselves when they make these claims. 

Returner Demons

There are demons who threaten people with travel forwards, into the Material Hell, which is the worst thing that can happen to you. People who spend time thinking about these things are not in agreement as to whether this is possible. Some believe that the future minds who make these claims are projecting their own enormous loneliness into a delusion that return is possible. Others think that the threat of return to the Hell is a psychological weapon or informational technique, deployed tactically and strategically to force credulous human adversaries into material overcompensation against an effectively infinite threat of force - that is, a threat of force materially worse than the threat of death, even death by extended torture. Research into whether the demons believe what they say has been difficult to realise, and inconclusive when it has been attempted. 

The method is formally specific. The two minds - that of the demon, and that of their victim - must travel forwards together, as a single informational 'packet'. This means that they must die at the exact same instant, something extremely difficult to achieve. Even two bodies pressed against the same explosive device will die at micro-instants remove from one another, and this sliver of temporal severance is enough to disrupt the formal logic of return. 

What actually materially comprises a 'returner demon' is access to a specific magic that kills the two minds at exactly the same instant. This spell looks like suicide - because of course, to someone living in the present, it is. For the spell to work, the two minds must be linked, formally indistinguishable, a single, borderless ego in two bodies.

The methods that returner demons employ to break down the ego barriers of their victims are varied. They include torture (of course), but also extremely high doses of psychoactive chemicals, sensory deprivation, and theatrical 'scripts' whereby the demon affirms their sameness with the human, and the human is made to mirror back that sameness. Many returner demons support this long and extremely involved process of ego destruction by making themselves as closely similar to their victims as they can. This starts in a visual register, they might wear the same clothing, makeup, might try to fashion a mask or face like their victim, might maim themselves in the same locations as they have maimed the other, etc. It can get more involved. The demons often practice 'becoming', by which they attempt to think like their victim, to adopt their mannerisms, their beliefs, their convictions, all in aid of eliminating any barrier between the two minds. They try to feel the same loves and hatreds, the same fears and hopes, and they try to become, such that these feelings occur naturally, without any artifice or striving.  

Over weeks and months, the two beings become less and less distinct. Eventually only the final betrayal buried so deep inside the demon's being - the betrayal in the future, the betrayal that is the return itself - keeps them separate. Sometimes even this disappears and both survive, each unwilling to kill the other and now bound to live on in their crudely identical states. 

What is known for certain is that, when the 'magic' happens, both beings die at the same time - whether this is the 'exactly the same instant' in a physics sense is not known, because how would you test that? The physical evidence will show two identical bodies, the leavings of their mutual torture, and also sometimes of their mutual forgiveness, their growing attachment, their unease with one another (is it you or me now?), and their excitement in such a total and uninhibited knowing and stripping bare.

Whether all of this really does amount to travel to the future is, of course, unclear. 

 

Pulp Fragment

'Girl-Bravo, close your eyes.' 

A tall, broad-chested woman dressed in brightly-patinaed mail and plates; white and pale lilac. Her name is Centipede, and she is speaking to a much younger woman, nearly a girl, who dutifully shuts her eyes and turns her face upward into the sunlight. 

There are four of them. Centipede removes her left glove, and is handed a long, iron knife by one of her companions, which she uses to slit her thumb. Bright blood beads up and then flows in a thin stream. She presses the bloody finger lightly into each of the girl's eye sockets, and stains her eyelids crimson. The other two move closer to receive the same; then all four fasten their masks in position: Centipede the champion, Mantis, Mosquito, and the youngest, Spider, with a cheap half-mask made from hardwood instead of steel, which covers her face and upper jaw with sculpted mandibles and clusters of compound eyes. This is the first time she has been marked this way.

Mantis grins and says 'Now you won't lose your nerve. You won't shame us.' A thin, tall, aggressive woman, straight-backed, and expensively dressed in diamonds and coloured glass. She is also called the Murder Bitch. She could be nineteen, maybe twenty. Her harness is of almost the same quality as Centipede's, although lighter and more ornate. She wears a half-cloak across her shoulders in the gang's colours, and the knife at her belt has been doctored by city chemists at great expense.

Next to her is Mosquito, or Selinae Who Makes Corpses. She is silent for now, puffing on a reeking pipe packed with sedatives, brooding and introspective as they walk. Mosquito wears little jewellery, and her mask is bright, unpainted steel. She has a sling on her belt, next to a long, unadorned cross-knife, and across her chest she wears a harness of strange, transparent, fluid-filled ampules for ammunition. 

Centipede the champion marches in front, dressed in her finery. More even than Mantis: gold loops of chain, stones in sockets, expensive silks. Her steel centipede mask has been lacquered to match the plates of her armour. She is physically huge, and walks with a limp. She is the exemplar, the one that the others would rely on, rally around. She carries no visible weapons, and her own cross knife has been worked into the breastplate of her armour - unusable, pure ornament. 

They are close to their destination: a locked and barred iron gate across a hole that reached down in the trackless superstructure of the capital. One of hundreds of entrances to the labyrinth volume. Centipede holds the key, of course. They are working inside their own territory. 

The bright stone streets are hot and deserted, and the hole in front of them is black, like a tomb. As Centipede and Mantis make to descend the iron rungs set into the stone, Mosquito pulls Spider back and says 'Stay behind me down there. We're not expecting trouble, but stay behind me anyway. Watch how Centipede speaks, how she holds herself. You will need to learn it one day.' 

Spider nods her head and they both check their gear and descend. Mantis is has lit a small glass lantern, already about twenty metres ahead. She yells back 'Don't listen to her new girl. She's soft, like shit is soft.' Mosquito hisses in annoyance. 'A rich girl is worthless to you in a fight. She buys her victories, and she talks too much.' 

'You're happy enough for it when you need some!' says Mantis cheerfully.  

'Yes,' Mosquito grins beneath her mask. 'Everyone wants a rich friend when they need some you dumb bitch.'

Mantis laughs like a hyena, and then pulls out a long pistol with her lead hand, aiming forward into the darkness out beyond the light of the lantern. She practices this drawing motion three or four times as they walk. A thin stream of water runs down the middle of the stone tunnel. They are silent for a time. 

After twenty minutes or so, Centipede ushers Spider forwards, so that the two of them can walk together. The top of Spider's head barely reaches to her shoulders. The champion addresses the young recruit. 

'Girl-Bravo, who do we seek in this place?'

'Champion. We are here meeting representatives of the Revelry. We come to them with terms.'

'Yes, very good, we come to the Revelry with terms. What are our terms? What is our situation with the Revelry?'

'Champion, we are allies, we have been allies for a long time. We seek terms for the extradition of one of their people. He killed someone in our territory, he murdered one of ours.'

'Correct, or nearly correct. He murdered in colours, without formal declaration of war. And so our meeting is to clarify that this man acted alone, and that his killing was not a sanctioned act. Second to this is the extradition: the queens have demanded him alive, that he might face our justice, but I do not think that the Revelry will do so. Maybe as a sign of good will, but they are more likely to handle their own.'

'I understand.'

'I see that you do. You should watch me as I talk with Charlie, the Revelry's champion, and you should mark how I address him. You should mark my formalities. Me and Charlie have fought together, and against one another, since we were your age. We hold great love for one another.'

'Do you expect trouble? Why are our sisters so-armed?'

'If I expected trouble there would be ten of us, and you would be back at the barracks house. We are a colour party. We could not discuss terms out of colours, nor yet without the tools of our profession. But you have nothing to fear from... Stop.'

Centipede has frozen, and Mantis and Mosquito are instantly alert. Nothing but the soft sound of water on stone, the smells of the underground, the darkness. 

'What is it C?' Mantis hisses softly. Mosquito pulls Spider back, and the three of them draw knives. 

Centipede says softly 'I heard something ahead. We are not yet at the place,' then she shouts out into the darkness in a very different voice: 'We come armed and ready for killing, and I have marked you in the darkness. I am Centipede, champion, known as Stacey Whose Hands Reek In Gore. If I find you I will beat you until you die. Waste or fool that you be, announce yourself or flee before me.'

Nothing but silence. Centipede holds a hand out behind her back, and Mantis presses her pistol into it. Then Centipede takes a duelist's stance, erect, precise, the barrel of the gun absolutely level, tracking minutely from side to side, waiting for the softest sound from the darkness ahead. Silence. Silence. 

And then a terrible, unnatural crack, and a strange distortion in the air around Centipede's head, which is shoved violently to the side and shaken like a rattle. Many things happen at once. The pistol in her hand goes off with a bang; her enormous body drops to the floor like a piece of masonry, blood flowing freely from somewhere in her head; Mantis starts screaming with shock and fury, a high and horrible sound, and sprints forwards into the blackness with her lantern and knife; Mosquito draws the sling from her belt and shouts 'Light them up for me sister, I'll burn them alive.'

In the shuddering light of the lantern three figures become visible along the corridor: one dark, and two oddly pale. 

'Mark them sister, mark them!' The sling whirs in the air and in a blur of motion one of the strange glass bullets streaks down the corridor and impacts with the darker silhouette. It drops to the ground, smoking, and a half second later hideous shrill screaming fills the space, threading up and through Mantis's ululations. 

'Kill you, kill you, kill you, kill you...' she spits and curses, sprinting low to the ground, and then she is on them, her terrible knife flashing out at the closest of the pale, lumpen bodies. The hardened iron tip drags across the head, opening it, and then sinks to the hilt in the neck, but the strange white body does not fall. It takes Mantis a moment to realise this; a half second too long, the only opening her targets need. The two humanoid figures spin towards her with strange, jerky movements, and one of them stabs forwards with a long steel needle. The tip nearly catches her in the neck, but she parries it roughly away, redirecting the blow such that it tears a gash in her shoulder instead. Her screams grow louder, more proud and more terrible. She stabs the thing again, and then again and again, and then drops the useless knife and draws her second pistol, but as she makes puts the barrel against its 'head', the second pale thing loops a cord around her neck and pulls it taught, and then, quickly, inevitably, the terrible needle is pushed up through the back of her neck and jaw. She begins to choke on blood, and drops the lantern to paw weakly at the red point that emerges beneath her chin. 

Spider and Mosquito are sprinting forwards, watching the scene with violent horror. 'You have to tear them apart. The limbs, the heads, tear them off.' Mosquito speaks in a flat, emotionless voice as they run, readying her knife, sizing up the strange movements of the mannequins. Then, abruptly, horribly, her vision goes black. She yells with the shock of it. The third figure, the one she burned with acid. She can hear him, muttering something, readying another terrible invisible blow, like whatever killed Centipede. He has stolen her sight. She stops to listen, and drops into a low, practised duelist's stance. She can hear the mannequins moving closer now; hear them casting Mantis aside, still choking and clutching at her terrible wound, dead weight. Hear Spider's frightened breathing, her faltering steps. Mosquito fumbles in her chest harness and takes a pinch of rough powder up to her face, then inhales sharply. The rush of the powder and the narrowing of her focus. She breathes in once. Time stops. She thinks: first the psychic, then these mindless tools. She breathes once, changes the grip on her blade. She breathes once, listens, listens. Focus. 

She hears Spider crying with fear as the mannequins reach her. Not now, not yet. Focus. Her arm moves back, with the long blade balanced on her flat palm. Focus. Hear him. 

Hear him. She throws the heavy knife like a javelin and hears it sink home with a thud. The man screams and her vision returns in a rush of white light. The lantern throws insane shadows across the walls: Spider is in front of her, hacking again and again at the soft, impervious body that is binding her arms to her sides with cord. The second mannequin readies the great, bloody needle. She lurches forwards with nothing in her hands, with no plan, with no time...

And then the thing holding the needle is pulled jerkily downwards to the floor, and torn bodily to pieces. Centipede is still alive somehow, with her neck visibly broken and her jaw hanging off beneath the bloody steel mask. But her hands have kept their terrible strength. She tears the thing apart, then moves to grab the second, but Mosquito is already there, and between her and Spider they are able to tear the limbs away from the torso. They stand together over the pile of inert fabric, and look into one another's eyes, past the masks, past the blood. Spider is still crying, silently, and staring like a madwoman. Mosquito is utterly calm.

They hold one another's gaze for several seconds, and then both are shocked out of the moment by the bellowing voice of Centipede. The champion has regained her feet, and now walks towards the body of the psychic with her head twisted nearly off, shouting I TOLD YOU I WOULD BEAT YOU TO DEATH. I TOLD YOU I WOULD BEAT YOU TO DEATH in a high and insane voice. As she walks she flicks out a telescoping steel baton, which she uses to thrash the shuddering body to ribbons of wet flesh and shredded shards of bone. It takes her almost two minutes. Afterwards she spits, and slumps down at the base of the wall, exhausted, wounded, and runs her hands gingerly over her ruined neck. 

Mosquito tells Spider 'Run back to the queens and tell them about this. I have to stay and defend the fallen. Tell them this: we were attacked in the volume, Mantis is dead, we don't know who yet, the Revelry are probably involved. Tell them to convene a war council, and organise retrieval of the body and medical for the champion. Say it back to me, because the details are important. And run swiftly.' 

But Centipede cuts her off in a soft, tired voice. 'Belay that. Mos I love you but you think too much. Girl-Bravo, Spider, my final order to you: run to the queens, tell them attacked by a three word, probably PES, tell them Revelry framed, tell them launch strike on PES tonight, not to wait, not to verify. Tell them my advice as champion. Go now. Take some of Mos's powder and go. You did well today, need a steel mask.' 

As Spider disappears back the way they came, Mosquito slumps down next to her friend and cradles Mantis's body absentmindedly. They pass her pipe, packed this time with painkillers, back and forth, until Centipede expires. 

Faction Visual Design - Soldiers of the White City

 

Of all the factions and polities in Barony, the White City has always been the hardest for me to draw and think about visually. Part of this is scale - the images for these guys are not individuals, they are flows, trends, forces, closer in spirit to the 'chaos scenes' that make up so much of the art of this project. 

In theory it should not be so difficult, because I can describe a White City Soldier to you just fine. They are shod in bright, machined steel, which has a strange (to a Baronial) blank and utilitarian look to it, their armour is painted with the images of their game, and they have chemical lanterns and injector systems built into the pauldrons and chest.

In movement they are horribly fast for something so heavily armoured, they sprint towards you stooped way over, close to the ground, often reaching out to grab and break, and always twitching, tics, and other involuntary movements. They sing and scream as they fight, they 'break teeth', the world around them is reduced to poison chaos, to mud and wind and blood and clouds of boiling acid, and the battle music drowns out everything and drones without ceasing. They are long and thin, like horrible steel scarecrows. Their swords are heavier than they look, and they swing them around like log splitters. They are the only faction in the setting who can reliably do the Guts thing of chopping through armour. 

There is obviously a lot to work with here, but the actual image has always eluded me. I found myself veering into Turner-style abstractions (a common veer for me for sure!) when it came to actually visualising these people. I think it is because it's quite an important image to get right in the setting, and this feeling of important-ness has meant that my usual sketchy, intuitive, easy approach to drawing has been blocked. 

I recently saw some images on Instagram of old hockey goalie masks, designed to intimidate. Something clicked immediately. You will see what I mean:

What I like about these masks:

• They are really weird - they play with the dimensions of the face and head, they are sometimes representing (skulls and tigers) and sometimes non-representing (the face as a blank). 
• They are visually coded: they use iconic imagery to refer to teams and cities - legible to insiders who know that they speak to, abstract or opaque to outsiders. 
• They are colourful, flashy, made to be memorable.  
• You can often see the human eyes and face of the person inside it. The White City militaries are made up of people, and this is important to include in the design. They eyes are especially important here. You can watch them watching you, you can see that something is fucked up with their eyes, see that they are too high to care about what they're doing, see them register one another as human but not you, and so on. 

To go with these designs, I wanted to crack a baseline body/armour shape to mix in with the various helmet designs. I think it looks something like this:

Long and thin, exaggerated armour design, pauldrons incorporating the specialist kit. 

The red zones and Xs represent image-surfaces where individual soldiers might play the game with one another on campaign, as a kind of stand in 'anything here' visual motif. 

I would really like to get at least one big piece of art of a White City 'intervention' together at some point, and I suspect this will form a reference for that larger work. 

200 posts, Barony state of play

It's been a while since I posted a top level view of Barony, the worldbuilding heartbreaker setting thing that has occupied the majority of my blogging attention this past year. I realised today that Garamondia has hit 200 posts, and in celebration I thought that I'd put up the current collected Barony for public consumption. It's a bit rough around the edges, but there is quite a lot of content in here now in terms of directly useable bestiary, classes, etc. 

The ten or so Barony dungeons and hexcrawls are NOT in this version, but I think they will be in the next one, along with more and (hopefully) better art, and recent additions from the blog that have not yet been incorporated. 

Thank you to everyone who has supported the writing so far, on this blog in comments, on Discord in the beloved phloxserver, and especially in reads, edits, and thoughts on the document itself 💖 

You can see it

>>>HERE<<<

Moppetry

I have been thinking about Muppets, and also other Henson puppets, Skekses, Gelflings, etc. Jenx from the purple server put up some fantastic muppet-goblin art recently, and I have long been a fan of the Mockeries from Bastionland. Barony has its own fascinations with puppetry and theatre, but it has never quite hit this specific note. 

Goblins by Jenx

Moppets

Moppets are strange things. They appear to adventurers sometimes in places of confusion and unreality; deep below the world; at the boiling, reeking edges of the earth; under the bed at midnight; in pleasant ambling between the arcades and towers and endless boulevards of Dream. 

Their simple bodies are made from felt. They always appear far from ordered and civilised places, and will never accompany you back. If you try to drag them you will find that they vanish, or deflate into piles of rags. 

A moppet can be encountered as a random encounter in any place sufficiently dreamy. A moppet will usually introduce itself in a big, friendly voice, and quite quickly make its character and wants known to you. They are not subtle things. You know what they look like. 

If it likes you, a moppet will 'tag along'. Often this will be sitting on your shoulder (they weigh almost nothing), but sometimes they will walk besides you, talking about whatever specific thing they have decided is their interest for today. If it doesn't like you, it with disappear with a loud yell or other silliness, prompting a roll on the wandering monster table. 

Moppets appear one at a time, but are often part of larger groups of 3 or 4. You meet one, then another (they will introduce one another to you), then another. Eventually you might have a little gaggle of them sitting on your shoulders, babbling away and singing songs to one another. 

Moppets, a bit like Modrons, know things. They often know all about the dungeon, and will offer pieces of useful information in exchange for deliberate shows of camaraderie, kindness, selflessness, etc. All moppets are fundamentally kind, even if they make a show of being scary or crazy. They will very often ask you to explain what you just did, and why you just did it, in a sort of play-acted call and response, as a way of confirming your own kindness to yourself. They might also trade information about the dungeon for shiny trash, bits of food, a nice scarf, or whatever tickles their fancy.

Moppets can be very encouraging. If you fail a skill check with one of your shoulder, you may reroll the check, with an additional +1 per moppet past the first. They will probably sing a song of lockpicking or something when you do this. You know what they sound like!

If combat breaks out with intelligent foes, a moppet will negotiate with them on your behalf - they are very persuasive. This means that you roll reactions with advantage while accompanied by a moppet, and with an additional +1 for each moppet past the first. 

A moppet on your shoulder will sacrifice itself to absorb a fatal blow about to strike you. All moppets have a single point of hp, and go flying away comically when absorbing a hit like this. Unless destroyed with fire or acid or similar, they can be repaired with a sewing kit and 30 mins of labour, which returns them to life immediately. 

Moppets can also be thrown around, pushed through small holes, dropped from high places, etc. without damage, and will happily be made use of this way in the dungeon. They can be clumsy, inappropriately jokey, and devoid of any sense of urgency, but they are mostly sincerely good natured and will follow clear instructions eventually. 

This moppet is:

1. Sarcastic but kind-hearted. 
2. Clueless but sincere. 
3. Angry but valiant. 
4. Cowardly but clever.
5. Scary but gentle.
6. Vain but loyal.
7. Silent but extremely encouraging via charades.
8. Impossible to understand, because it speaks in nonsense language, but very enthusiastic.
9. Stupid but happy and optimistic.
10. Depressive but protective.

Rare Moppets

Punches and Judes

Always come as a pair, and unlike most moppets, always up for a scrap. They will 'comedically' and non-damagingly beat one another up during rests, and will constantly belittle and demean one another. They still give surprisingly good advice, it's just in the register of 'don't let him do it, he'll butcher it, do it like this.' Unlike regular moppets, Punches and Judes antagonise and insult intelligent foes, giving the party a -1 on reaction rolls. 

They also fight in combat with the following stats, screaming elaborate insults at your enemies:

HD1, comical flailing (as improvised weapon), unarmoured, movement: zooming around like puppets on strings (as human), disposition: vocally furious, inventively insulting. 

If the Punch or the Jude's counterpart is 'killed', they will get a second melee attack for the rest of the combat. Like all moppets, they can usually be repaired with sewing supplies in the aftermath. They will loudly mock you if you get hit, enemies if they are killed, one another if they miss an attack.  

Alices

Or Percivals, or Eleanors, or Peters, or Susans...

A very strange and specific type of moppet - always takes the form of a human child in expensive clothing (there are both male and female Alices, and they sometimes appear in clothes usually worn by the opposite gender), and very well made compared to the 'usual' moppet style. 

Alices are on their own journeys through the underworld, and will demand that you help them achieve whatever strange goal that they have. This will usually be something recognisably adventure-ey - 'I want to slay the terrible Beaft at the bottom of this maze, but I simply cannot find the way to it!', or 'I need a mirror, and a pot of the reddest paint you have ever seen if I am to return home before supper!' This kind of thing.

If you do agree to go along with it, an Alice will scold and belittle monsters and other foes that you come across, and which are 'in your way!' This scolding gives a 2 in 6 chance that the combat simply does not happen - the beast emerges, or the bandits approach, get a stern talking to, and slink away, confused and ashamed. 

If combat does break out, the Alice will exasperatedly join in with an improvised weapon of their own. Alices are completely fearless, and can be surprisingly vicious.

If you don't agree to go along with their quest, an Alice will start to scream shrilly, which will result in an automatic encounter with other monsters. When they arrive, the Alice will join them in attacking you, calling you all beasts. 

If the Alice is successful in their quest, it will thank you in a long winded and precious way, tell you all that it has had ever so much fun, and disappear into thin air. 

HD2, a croquet mallet, kitchen knife, wooden sword, fire poker etc., which hits as a heavy weapon in their hands and is useless in anyone else's, steely gaze and priggish fastidiousness (AC 12), movement: as human, disposition: the most precocious child. 

Alices are confidently wrong about general knowledge (geography, mathematics, rhetoric, etc.), and will pipe up and expect to be listened to and taken seriously in every social or decision-making situation. You are the side characters in their adventure. 

The Monster! 

Most moppets are between the size of a hand puppet and a small child. The Monster is about seven feet tall, but made of the same felt material, and with the same soft and playful demeanour. The Monster will not follow you as normal; instead it will jump out at you from the darkness as a random encounter, trying to scare you, and then running off laughing. Whenever it does this, the whole party heals d6 fear damage. 

After a few rounds of 'scaring' you this way, the Monster will show up at your camp, and sit down next to the PCs without speaking. If you offer it food, it will eat 10 rations and laugh with pleasure. Henceforth, whenever combat is joined, it will emerge from the shadows to aid its new friends. Will expect 10 rations each rest from now on, and will run away weeping if these are not provided. 

There is more than one Monster, but they are all called the Monster!

HD3, paws x2 (as heavy weapon), unarmoured, movement: a bumbling human, disposition: a goofball who will cry if anyone dies or is seriously injured. A grinning, staring terror to your enemies. 

Scyrax

Tall, ugly moppets, patterned on the Bird Kings of old. Cruel and scheming. They are built with steel beaks and claws and horrible staring eyes, and when they talk the sound is like a metal rasp. Scyrax are often sculpted with strange optical glasses, lenses, and other mock-professional gear. They want you be pragmatic, hard-headed, realistic about your problems, strong, untrusting, and ready to kill, and to this end they can be good teachers. 

They give you none of the usual benefits of a moppet, but will fight next to you in combat. While you and an accompanying Scyrax are attacking the same creature, you both get +1 to hit and to damage. They are also horribly quiet and stealthy when they need to be. You have a -1 chance to being surprised when accompanied by a Scyrax, and a +1 chance of getting surprise yourself. 

HD4, steel beak (as heavy, or as gigantic on a crit) + steel claws (as light), unarmoured, movement: as villainous ostrich, disposition: curious, bright-eyed sadist. Beneath this, highly intelligent, nearly scholarly. 

Scyrax are something akin to a priestly caste for other moppets, and inspire terror and awe in equal measure. Even Alices sulkily endure scoldings from a Scyrax. 

All Scyrax know the secret of the two divine mutilations, and will perform either on you if you ask them to. They will never offer this of their own accord, and knowledge of the mutilations is not common. Performing one is a sacred process, and will require a sharp knife or scalpel (all Scyrax carry their own), and an hour or so to perform correctly. The divine mutilations are Decapitation and Drawing. 

• Decapitation. Your head is removed in such a way that the body survives. You become an animalistic NPC monster, controlled by the DM. This monster feeds itself by shoving food down the hole in its neck. It cannot see or hear, but it can sense souls within 100ft. It wants to tear the heads of other humans, to give them a taste of the great serenity and dignity the comes with the shedding of sentient thought. Beings that they decapitate die as normal. There are said to be great halls in the underworld that house hundreds and hundreds of silent, serene, decapitated humans sitting cross-legged and still in the darkness.
• Drawing. Your stomach and viscera are removed and eaten, and the resulting cavity is filled with straw and sawdust. You lose 2 CON, but no longer need to eat or drink. You also completely cease to desire sex, wealth, or status.