A Few Stories (Snowblind & Hungry; Speculative Mythology)

 

These stories are told across the face of dead Earth. They are speculative or original mythology based heavily on PIE, Semitic, and to a lesser degree Mesoamerican ('lesser' for relative lack of comprehensive knowledge, not interest) motifs for a setting/game I tentatively have titled Snowblind & Hungry, a post-apocalyptic fantastical bronze-age-collapse milieu that I began writing a couple of years ago.

You live in an unsettled time - a time of the First Winter - a time for the snowblind and the hungry.

 

All art by me. Beyond this point lies copious artistic nudity - be warned!

 

On Divine Nomenclature: In every mortal tongue the personal names of the oldest deities are synonymous with the works and deeds which they gave name to—thus we are given Earth Father, Sky Mother, Ocean, Shaper, Thunder Princess, Sun Princess, etc…

In common parlance, these are called gods. Deities with lesser attainments are called demigods, and have ordinary personal names.

 

An Account of Early Times 

In the beginning there were the primordial waters, which were without light, heat, or solid matter. In this time Earth Father and Sky Mother dwelt far above, and saw nothing of value in the abyss. For uncounted eons they lived with only one another for company and contended with things that are forgotten by history.

In time, Sky Mother learned to birth others like her, and her get swelled the ranks of the gods, some conceived with the aid of Earth and others born of her own seed. Earth Father made from his fingernails and toenails the metals, solid things which lacked the changeability of water, and so houses and tools came to be and the districts of Heaven were first built.

The younger gods became curious about the abyss their parents had scorned, and began to swim in the upper waters. One day Thunder Princess, the loudest and boldest of Sky’s daughters and greatest wrestler in the Universe, was embroiled in an argument with her siblings; to prove her superiority she climbed to the highest point in Heaven and dove into the waters, sinking deeper than any had before. She found in the deepest abyss a thing which assailed her eyes and caused her to squint and tremble, a thing which she had never seen—light. She chased the light through the depths, having all sorts of folkloric adventures, and eventually managed to pin it between her thighs and drag it up from the waters. This was how fire was discovered.

 

At first all the gods marveled at the flame Thunder Princess had discovered, and joyously basked together in its warmth and illumination. Eventually, Earth Father and Sky Mother began to squabble over its stewardship—since Thunder Princess was their shared daughter, they each believed they had a filial right to watch over it. Their children despaired to see them fight, and for a time the two elders consented to share fire, trading it back and forth equally. 

Soon this pact dissolved, and the deities battled. Sky castrated Earth and threw him down from Heaven, and where his body landed in the primordial waters it became the land, and his innards formed the Underworld, the realm of Death. His genitals fell into the waters and from the foam and the mingled fluids of life and death came the goddess Ocean, who sired the serpents of the sea.

 

 

Thereafter, Sky sat in judgment over the courts of the Gods. Those of her children who had sided with Earth were exiled to live in his belly, where they became the gods of the Underworld. Of Earth’s sons, all the metals save Iron clove to him, and were cast down to rot with him. Bronze, the captain of the rebellious metals, was divided into Copper and Tin as punishment for his leading role. Iron was rewarded with special privileges, and in time came to furnish the stars.

 

Thunder Princess continued to be fascinated by the fire she discovered. She sought the aid of her full sibling Shaper, who had inherited more of her father’s nature than most, and was the most skilled in Heaven at the creation of beautiful things.

With her sister’s help she wrought fire into the three grades of lightning and presented it to her mother as a coronation gift. Sky Mother was so pleased that she granted Thunder the right to wield the first two grades of lightning at her leisure, whereas the other gods were permitted to use only the lowest grade without permission; she kept the highest grade of lightning for herself.

One day Shaper descended to the Earth to give offerings to her father’s corpse and noticed that some of his body had been softened by the waters and turned to soft clay. She learned that this clay could be shaped like metal, yet kept some of the fluidity of water. She began to create new forms.


During this time Sky Mother came to regard the fires of Heaven as insufficient. She desired to create a light that would illuminate the entire Universe, so all could behold the majesty of her queendom. She tasked Shaper to build a throne and altar that would display her spoils and proclaim her glory to the world. The great work of building the Disc of the Sun began.

As Shaper labored she began to grow despondent. Whenever she could escape her duties she furtively returned to sculpt the clay, but she despaired of Sky Mother finding her out, for she knew that her mother would forbid her from wasting her efforts on such a worthless diversion, and she knew that once the Sun was completed the Earth would be lit up and she would no longer be able to return in secret. Still, she continued.

One day Thunder Princess discovered Shaper sneaking out of Heaven, and since the two sisters loved each other best of all the gods she decided to aid her. Thereafter, when Shaper wished to sculpt, Thunder Princess would go forth to give battle to Ocean and her sea-monsters, causing such a clamor with her bellowing voice and her booming lightning that all the Universe couldn’t help but stop and observe, and while Sky weas distracted Shaper could descend to the dark Earth and do her work freely. And so it is that the upper surface of the Earth was entirely covered in beautiful forms.

 

The night before the Disc of the Sun was to be lit, Shaper returned one last time and sculpted a figure in her own image. As she turned to leave she was struck by the loneliness of the sculpture, and created a second figure in the image of her favorite sibling, Thunder Princess. Upon her return to the Heavens, she was struck by inspiration and realized a way to keep her creations safe from her mother. She appealed to Thunder Princess, who was apprehensive but agreed to help,so long as her role in the scheme was kept hidden. Thunder Princess went forth to treat with Ocean on Shaper’s behalf; she informed Ocean of the impending lighting of the Sun’s Disc. As Ocean raged at Sky Mother’s arrogance, Thunder suggested to her a trick: if she were to take some clouds and fill them with water, they would become heavy and dark and block Sun’s light. Ocean was convinced, and set to work filling the Middle Air with rainclouds. 

The next day, when Sky Mother fire to her Disc for the first time, she was furious to discover a solid wall of black clouds that barred half of the Universe from witnessing it. Shaper suggested that she use her mighty Breath of Life to blow the clouds away; Sky Mother did so. As the Breath of Life blew over the Earth, all the sculptures that Shaper had devised became imbued with motion; immediately thereafter, the Sunlight shone through the parted clouds and began to bake and fire the clay, fixing the forms. This is how mortals came to be.

When Sky Mother saw the surface of the Earth writhing with living things her fury redoubled. She began to hurl lightning, and commanded all her children to do so as well, and so the Earth shook with their wrath, but because the animals had been filled with the Breath of Life they were able to move to seek shelter and so the gods were unable to cull them all. Then Sky Mother saw the animals which resembled her daughters and realized that she had been fooled. She called Shaper and Thunder Princess before her and demanded an explanation. Shaper resolved to shoulder her mother’s scorn, and so claimed sole responsibility for the deed. 

Sky Mother decreed that Shaper was to be executed and cast down from Heaven to lie beside her father, but was moved at the last minute to mercy when she beheld the blazing palace that Shaper had built for her. Instead, Sky Mother had Thunder Princess cut Shaper’s hands from her wrists and exiled her to the Underworld, where she was given a hero’s welcome and hailed as Queen. It is said that the decision to make Thunder Princess the instrument of Shaper’s punishment taught both siblings anger, and was the cause of things to come.

 

The first humans, made in the image of Shaper and Thunder Princess, were called Manu and Yemua. It is said by some that they were Man and Woman in whole, by others that they were only alike to Man and Woman in the function of their genitals, and yet others will say that both possessed the duality of Sky’s form.

They made fruitful and multiplied, and in time came to be found in all parts of the Earth.

An Account of Later Times

In the beginning fire belonged to the gods. The trickster Laughing-Dog taunted impetuous Thunder Princess, daughter of Sky Mother, until she smote them with a purloined thunderbolt and lit the first wildfire. So it was that fire became no longer the sole province of the heavens. Thereafter she was exiled from the upper air and became vengeful Storm, raging across the land and attempting fruitlessly to extinguish that which she loosed upon the Earth.

In later times the first witch En tamed wildfire to make campfire in the same way that men subsequently turned wolves into dogs. Fire was bred into new forms—bonfires, cookfires, temple-fires, forge-fires. The trick of burning offerings was discovered, and used to propitiate Storm until she gentled and became grudgingly fond of mankind. Copper and Tin were dug up in this time, and subdued into the form of tools with the aid of fire.

A wizard called Tubalcain sat in his forge and heard a song of lamentation as he beat copper into spearheads. He found its counterpart in the sounds of tin, and realized the two yearned to be brought together. With the help of fire he facilitated the marriage of copper and tin to begin the Age of Bronze. He brought into mortal hands swords, armor, and kingship.

 

In more recent days the Lich-Queen Amaranth began to covet Iron, which was reserved by the gods for their own use. She assembled a cabal of sorcerers and worked a subtle magic to subvert and command the celestial fires that mantled the stars. She dragged iron from the sky, laying waste to the greatest kingdoms of the Bronze Age and beginning the Age of Iron.

  

Apocrypha

Some people say that when Thunder Princess dove into the primordial waters and saw the light in the deep, it was not a flame that she wrestled but a deity, flaming and glorious. Some people say that she laid with Fire down there in the water, and returned to the surface with a dancing lock of his hair as a token and a flaming seed in her belly. Some people say that the hair was given to her mother and her father but the seed she kept for herself, and that it grew into a radiant child, and that eventually she called Shaper to midwife the birth and the horned serpent Lightning came forth from her loins.

 

Those same people say that she repeated that feat with the deity Ocean, in the time before the Sun was first lit, and that the child of this coupling was the feathered serpent Rain.

The rain-fed rivers are Rain returning to their mother. The artesian rivers are the veins carrying the blue blood of Dead Earth. The shared heredity of Lightning and Rain is why they often travel together, and why rivers and lightning take the same shape

There are also, I presume, versions in which Lightning is envisioned as the child of Thunder Princess and Shaper, born of a furtive assignation in which the two lovers coupled hidden within a hearth in order to avoid the attentions of their jealous divine spouses. The version in which everything is Thunder Princess’s child is generally told by cultures that understand her as a fertility goddess, and the rain as life-bringing. The Earth People have their own fertility-god, Oasis.

On the Underworld

The cavities and abscesses of Dead Earth’s body were the great caves, and these became the countries of the murdered and exiled. Earth’s belly became the kingdom called Xibalba, and this is where Queen Architect reigns from. His intestines became the Labyrinth (or perhaps the great eyeless worm called Labyrinth).

 

 

Some people say that Shaper Mother, being the maker of us all, lays claim to our bodies and souls. Some people say that she laid with Titan, avatar of Lead, to make the race of Giants and put them to building a giant set of bellows from her father's lungs, and with the pumping of the great bellows all the dying breaths of mankind are sucked into the world below to be reunited with their bodies. Some people repeat the same story, but say that she laid with a mortal hero—one who dressed so beautifully and walked so gracefully that she mistook them for a spirit—and that from this act of accidental incest were born the vile Nephilim, who she set to back-breaking labor out of shame.

Some people say that Queen Architect lives in a pale-shining palace of kingfisher jade, and that a moat of black mud surrounds it from the outlying districts of the City Down Below. Only a soul as light as a feather can cross the mud to feast with her; those who cannot will find themselves sinking down, down, forever-on-down until they emerge from a cyst in Dead Earth's back into the deep lightless abzu below. 

Some people say that, having gained animation via Sky Mother's breath of life, she lays claim to our souls after death, that our breath rises all the way up to her. 

Some people say that Storm, having grown fond of the boldest of us, intervenes to spirit away the brave to her cloud-pavilion in the middle air.

Creation of Demons

Many stories tell that when Shaper first came to live in the belly of the Earth she attempted to craft new living things to keep her company, and this is where demons and monsters come from. Some people say that these creatures were ugly, malformed, and hateful because, lacking the use of her hands, she had to make them with her feet; some people say that she dictated her instructions to another, whose skill was insufficient to make the beautiful and noble forms she had in mind; some people say she was simply in a bad mood. Notable products of this phase in her creative career include Flayed Ape, Great Big Olm, and Aspen Tree (of which there is only one in the world, with a great many shoots). 

One version of this story: Shaper was such a skilful artisan that, even with her feet, her sculpting was immaculate. But every night, when she went to sleep, the Moon (who is also called Lunatic) came to her in her dreams and filled her up to the brim with phlegm. 

Digression: phlegm is the missing humor, seemingly absent from Earth’s corpse. It belongs to Moon, who only shows up in dreams—there is a reason why particularly deep dreamers tend to drool. 

She began to walk in her sleep, and every night she would sabotage her day’s work, making it ugly and evil. Eventually she became so disheartened by this that she began to swaddle her feed in strips of thick cloth, so that she would not feel tempted towards the act of creation. 

Others attribute this act of creation to a shedu called Thousand Demon Mother, who is sometimes identified with En, the first witch. Here is a story that is often told about her: when she went down to Xibalba after her death, she found herself a mendicant in the outer districts of the City-Down-Below. Frustrated, she banked the cookfires of the shedim with a word, and denied them their cooked food and mulled shedeh, and refused to speak the fires back to life until the shedim agreed to give over one quarter of their provisions to the dead people of the outer districts. This is how the sacrifice of one quarter of a cooked animal came to be known as the “dead man’s share,” and how it became the rightful sacrifice to one’s ancestors.

Thousand Demon Mother is known to have five awful daughters, the most wicked of her creations: Lady Famine, assigned to torment peasants; Lady Fear, assigned to torment foreigners; Lady Blindness, assigned to torment artisans; Lady Weakness, assigned to torment warriors; Lady Madness, assigned to torment kings.  

A common synthesis is to believe that Shaper made the fleshly demons that walk, crawl, and slither, whereas Thousand Demon Mother made the intangible spirits that drift and fly. A third deity, the Great Satan, child of Sky, is sometimes also said to have made the invisible spirits—in this case, the division is further made between the children of Great Satan, who made the heavenly demons out of wind and smokeless flame, and the children of Thousand Demon Mother, who made the chthonic demons out of miasmas and smoke.

On the Men of Uruk

Tubalcain married Tin and Copper into Bronze, and turned that gift to bloody ends. He made the first sword and cut apart society at knifepoint, inventing class stratification.

The Four Evil Deeds

This is a story told about Tubalcain: that he had four friends who he loved, and no one else.

The first was called Conquest, and he came to Tubalcain one day and said “the people of Uruk spring to your commands like well-broken dogs. It should be like this everywhere.” Tubalcain agreed, and he toured the young cities and brandished his sword and everywhere he went the people were made to kneel and lay flowers at his feet. But when he left they went back to their old ways and composed bawdy poems about him and drew caricatures of him with white clay and ocher.

The second was called War, and, seeing this, she came to Tubalcain one day and said “we should break the bodies of the lesser men, so they know that we are the best.” Tubalcain agreed, and so he raised up all the men of Uruk, and armed them with Bronze, and he fought the first war, and churned the fields to bloody mud, and all the men of Uruk were stained forever. But after a time the sons of those he had killed in the first war grew restless and threw his men out, and they met on the martial plain, and again the fields were watered, and again his men emerged from the charnel pits, and though this happened many times his subjects would not cease their clamorings.


The third was called Famine, and she came to Tubalcain one day and said “the people fight you because they enjoy the fruits of the earth and are hearty. We should take away their food, and then they will be too tired to resist.” Tubalcain agreed, and so he had his men round up all the corn, and he locked it all away in great towers, and put bronze-shod guards at the doors. But after a time the people remembered the old ways of living, and filled their bellies with the spear, the net, and the foraging knife, and though it was a meager life compared to the plenty of the fields it was better than the bargain Tubalcain offered.



The fourth was called Death, and he came to Tubalcain one day and said “you should kill everyone.” Tubalcain agreed, and gathered up the headmen of the cities that paid him tribute, and made them all draw lots, and sent his men to the city of the lord who drew the shortest straw and put every last resident to the sword. After this, the people no longer made any clamor at all.


The mixed-up parts of the people he had buried under a great tumulus made of the broken-up pieces of their own city, and the name of that place became the Ghostmound. It is known as a place of evil miasmas, and all those who live upon the tell suffer terrible dreams every night, which makes it attractive to artists and doomsayers.


After this, Tubalcain drew together his four captains and handed them each a sword of Bronze, and said “I will make you my horse-men.” He changed the language so that the names of his captains were remembered forever as synonymous with their deeds, and the arrogance of this so angered the gods that his people suffered great misfortune forevermore.

The Four Horse-Men

This is the story of how he made the four horse-men: for each of his captains, Tubalcain gathered up a thousand horses. He slaughtered them, and milled up their bodies, and for each of his captains he gathered up a hundred horses and fed them the remains. Then he took those hundreds, and slaughtered them, and milled up their bodies, and for each of his captains he gathered up ten horses and fed them the remains. Then he took those tens, and slaughtered them, and milled up their bodies, and for each of his captains he found a single mighty stallion—for Conquest, a white horse; War, a red horse; Famine, a black horse; Death, a ‘pale’ horse— and fed them the remains. Then he severed the heads from the stallions, hollowed them out and breathed his pride and malice into them, and made war-masks of them.


Did they do anything? Well, they were apparently pretty scary to look at.

I Fucking Fear Science!!!

Disregard any idea you have of the pop-cultural image of scientist. This is about what a scientist actually is, or could be. 

  

Sketching. I was also practicing Chinese on the same canvas but w/e you'll probably think it's aesthetic. 

 I think that most people tend to vastly underestimate just how good modern scientists working at the cutting edge are at what they do. Set aside the profit motives, the murky dealings and vicious crab-bucket rivalries of academia, the chokehold major publishers and journals have on academic publishing, etc... for a moment ignore all that mud splattered on the pristine white lab coat and allow yourself to appreciate the crystalline purity and sort of fractal enormity of the knowledge which we have attained. We know an unfathomable amount about our world. We can explain what we are made of down to the sub-subatomic scale, at minimum. We understand how humans came to be, we know the history of earth on a geologic scale, we know of times before the written word, before oral record. We have a reasonably good idea of what the literal first moments of the Universe probably looked like. We know about cosmic prisons from which there is literally no escape, have located them, and have recently managed to take pictures of them. As the title suggests, this isn't meant to be an "I Fucking Love Science" type screed—as much as I am in awe of the power and majesty of science I also live in deep fear of the idiots who are put in charge of it—but if you contemplate the literally mythic scope of our achievements... well, it's a mighty hubristic age we live in.

Anyways, that's just one of the big themes of the Hex.

Trickle Down Economics (Hex/Arise Ye Wretched, Lore & Class)

 

Source: my friend's "spooky images folder."

 Why Are There Dungeons Anyways?

     Understand this: the Hex is not new. Nobody knows how old it is. This is not an expanding universe, it is one with well-defined dimensionality. They cannot measure the age of the rocks when alchemy can birth fresh rocks anew. Maybe the hexagonal ice-walls were installed at some point—there are, in fact, sects that exalt the idea of that prelapsarian planar eon. The power of the occult further complicates the matter—civilizations can fall, not into decay or ruin but into secrecy, into secluded retreat; to the scholars (but not Scholars) of the modern Hex, these unimaginable swathes of history are elided into a single time period: Antediluvity.

    This should not be take to mean that the Hex is a “Dying Earth,” however. The Hex is a Living Earth—the cultures and sentiences upon it are not all pale, nostalgic echoes of a faded lost age. They are new buds, vigorous new forms of life, new ideas and passions and arts and hatreds. Eons past are not detritus but soil in which the seeds are planted. And healthy plants have deep roots—the Hex’s down is far more navigable than our own, and there has long been a continuum of cultural mingling and exchange between surface downers and dwellers of the upper mesocosm, for good and for ill.

    The Interdark is a traditional refugium for peoples, ideas, and practices that have been scoured from the surfaces by force or by time. History runs deep there, and the rigid progression of historical stages breaks down into a murky mosaic—the complex technical civilizations of Dwarves, the analytical silklooms and tensegrity structures of the Drow, the slow, deep rhythms of the technology-averse but incredibly long-lived Olm, and others incalculable. There is something that drags immortals down here, a hidden urge - some desire to be in synch with the passage of hexalogical time.

    Also, there are Illithids, commonly called Mind Flayers by all around the world in proud defiance of any sort of hubristic claims to ‘copyright’ or ‘product identity.’ Hex legal scholars have long since determined that nobody can copyright a funny squid-faced freak and besides I’m not even selling this, get fucked losers. I don’t actually know what’s up with them but I just remembered that I had resolved to not care at all about the normal euphemisms and placeholders.

Why Are They Called Dungeons?

    Because kings used to throw prisoners down there to starve to death or get tortured and eaten by horrible monsters, duh.

Demi-Dungeons

    These refer to above sea-level archaeological sites that are still (or have recently been made) “active” in a raiding and salvaging—tombs, labyrinths, etc…

    On the top, these are usually of Late Antediluvian provenance and are inside mountains, fortified barrow-bunkers, and other such flood-resistant constructions. The underside has more and older surviving sites, which makes it such a magnet for topside adventurers (in the Cortés, Napoleon, looted antiquities kind of way).

    They’re “demi” because there’s a lot of overlap in skillset, training, and hazard, but expeditions to these tend to draw in a more varied set, since they tend to be (on average) less vertical, more technically and semiotically consistent, better-studied and characterized, and easier to just pummel with explosives from outside and then sort through the wreckage.

Cleared Dungeons

    Some dungeons are naturally vacant, or about as inhabited as a common cave. Others have been rendered devoid of their native inhabitants by some catastrophe, or by intelligent action. Exploring these is about as dangerous as caving in a creepypasta world, which is to say, you’ll statistically be fine but you could get got really badly so it’s a bit of an extreme thing to do for sport.

    Organized dungeon clearance is an extremely lucrative and controversial practice that is a common target for symbionist and teratophile protest and actionism. It’s also a common source of jobs for those willing to serve as indiscriminate exterminators. Sometimes, this boils down to a routine pest control job of a sort not all that different from what’s required in modern residences (“pests” in the Hex are a little more varied and a little more dangerous than ours, requiring a more hardened and cunning breed of exterminator) and you can go home with a mostly clean conscience.

    Other times, you will find flyers openly advertising jobs for genocidaires; while this kind of work is illegal in much of the world, there is rampant criminal collusion with “deep development” enterprises that results in unreported massacres, forced evictions, use of terror campaigns against dungeon-dwellers. These activities are concentrated in certain countries with controversial teratocidal politics, but were widespread as recently as the 9960s and still crop up in lurid news scandals every once in a new moon.

Neon Dungeons

    A euphemistic insider term amongst professionals for a modern site like a bunker, office, subsextanean facility, or other kind of active dwelling that has been identified as a potential target for an illegal or grey-legal raid. It refers to both the halogen lighting common to this kind of place and to the modern, the chic, the now; neon as a metonym for the 9980s zeitgeist.

    Many dungeon-crawling skills are cross-applicable, and crawlers who are both reputable and morally-flexible can find a fortune in doing deniable sabotage, theft, corporate espionage, and other Shadowrunful pursuits. Many more find a prison cell, a one-way ferry to Carcerii, or an early grave.

I Hear Ya, Bub, But What’s In It For Me???

    Apart from all the various ways you can get paid to go do it, there’s a lot to be made in commodities extraction. Speculative dungeon purchases can often result in boomtown dynamics, especially in regions with weaker law and higher rates of privation. If you spend long enough as a hireling, maybe one day you’ll make enough to buy your own chunk of crawlspace and become the site boss—the ‘dungeon master,’ one might even say :dmthink:. These site bosses can get spectacularly rich or go spectacularly broke; they are a peculiar breed of business-person and are often loved for their grit and eccentricity or hated for their graft, idleness, insensitivity to loss of life, and zealous combination-busting. Get the UDW in, though, and they’ll clear up their act right quick.

    The treasure-chest full of gold pieces is a symbol of the dungeoneering scene in the same way it represents a pirate or tomb-raider or something. Gold, both in deposit and artefact form, is an important strategic resource for both its numismatic and noctilucent properties; those who do not have magmatic, chemical or spirit lakes to tap for fuel, fertilizer and agriculture are totally reliant on the four fuels to generate the energetic conditions for growth. We have yet to discover a self-growing plant—at least, not one that doesn’t require dabbling in draconism. Naturally, magic in all forms is able to create exceptional cases, as is its general purpose.

    All these forgotten eons, compressed into mulch, packing the spaces between those pipes and corridors that stay standing, the pillars that held strong. A complex layering of forms, hexological strata that outnumber ours by an immense margin, old wonders gradually digested by their own energies until all that remains are sumps of self-luminous unrefined azoth. Filtering this stuff into white mercury (AKA the regular kind, quicksilver, element Hg, hydrargyrum, etc…) and trace red mercury (the stuff that costs millions of gp per barrel) is well beyond the means of all but the most technologically advanced and well-capitalized, but any number of speculation firms are willing to fund expeditions and buy finds for a pretty copper piece. If you hit a reservoir above your transportation capacity, you can still get a hefty paycheck via finder’s fee; how big a cut you can expect is largely a function of where your name can get you through the door.

    You can of course find all sorts of artefacts, meet strange people, encounter daimons both eu- and kako-, kill rare and endangered beaſts and strip them for their various libido-enhancing bits, and do all sorts of other creative profit-seeking arrangements.

What is a Dungeoneer Like?

    The dungeoneer is a profession about as old as the miner—the two trades go hand-in-hand, to the point that in the industrial up they are traditionally organized under a single labor combination, the United Deep Workers.

    They are a little bit like spelunkers, insofar as they are trained in speleology, and a little bit like commercial divers, in that they are getting paid, and a little bit like mountaineers, in that they are by necessity experienced in the techniques of descent and ascent, and a little bit like soldiers of fortune, in that there is an undeniable stink of ‘this should be illegal’ hanging over the whole affair.

    There is a transnational character to the dungeon-crawler because there is a transnational character to the dungeon—these labyrinthine tunnels routinely defy borders and laws. But this is also an intensely local subculture, one that spawns entirely disconnected ecosystems of jargon, technique, etiquette, ritual, superstition, etc... that can be so finely grained as to vary from dungeon to dungeon. Nonetheless, there is a general distinction between the cultures of descent in the Hexagonal Up and Hexagonal Down: 

The Up

    Within the context of topside cultures, the aesthetics of dungeon crawling and soldiery are reversed. The soldier is a swaggering landsknecht or a loyal person-at-arms; the dungeon-crawler is a long-suffering peon or a cool operator. The soldier is bound by all sorts of rules of lawful combat; in the chaos of the dungeon, anything goes.

    The crawler is a 3.5 dungeonpunk filtered through the lens of a Metal Gear Solid; the belts get replaced by actual harnesses, sensible carabiners and D-rings for climbing, MREs and tinned plums. They’re some of the only people who you’ll ever see carrying slaughter weapons openly. They eschew the massive polearms and cleavers of their motorplated surface counterparts for tactical rapiers and parrying daggers (or T-RAP and P-DAG, after the iconic discontinued military models that are still extremely popular on the secondary market). They have matte-steel machetes with sawteeth for wire-cutting, punch daggers, butterfly knives, batons, tonfas, and war-picks—the latter of which is a favorite recipient for various aftermarket pneumaspike mods.

    They’re generally obsessed with compressed-air and pneumatic tech for its silence, low price, and abundance; they argue endlessly about artisanal handpumps or high-end autocompressors and which of them makes you more of a poseur; the most daredevil of them build custom body-harness maneuver rigs that approach 3D Maneuver Gear territory, with all the attendant ways that can go very, very wrong.

    Their preference for tacticool gear means that when you see one loaded down with antiques and “costume pieces” they’re either an aesthetic rebel or a very, very successful salvager.

    They like their guns cut short; a favorite joke goes that in mine towns, they sell shotguns with a dotted line already drawn around the barrel labeled saw off here. Standard vs. bullpup magazine loading is another bizarre cultural shibboleth - surface martial types think that bullpup rifles look ridiculous and will mock them loudly, which often results in a brawl. There’s a bit of a class thing going on, but in a way that’s finely-grained and highly specific; outsiders’ attempts to butt in usually results in a temporary alliance to kick their butts right back out. Crossover duels between saber-wielding legionnaires and rapier-wielding crawlers are a classic derby fight that rarely occurs “in the wild” but is still put on semi-regularly for televised spectacle. Technically illegal under modern dueling law, these fights are mostly conducted in free-duelling sanctums like Boncloud and the Dagger Islands and are a big attraction point for the new jet-set.

    The old word for them is ‘katabatistes,’ and their exercise ‘katabasis.’ It has always been done in some capacity, even in periods of active sequestrationism, but the social basis of katabasis has morphed over time. During periods where mining concerns were often owned and overseen by aristocrats, it was common for the aristocrats to furnish specialist retainers to perform forward scouting operations—in fact, an obligation to do so was often baked into the coronal charter under which the original mine-owners were allowed to open the vein in the first place. It was fairly common for skilled thieves to have their sentences commuted to be indentured or enslaved for this role, resulting in the profession’s association with the noble art of the pentadactyl discount.

    In the 98th and 99th century, katabasis became known in fashionable Azimuthi and Ormilláis circles as donjonisme, from whence the modern term ‘dungeoneer’ is etymologically descended. The term katabasis is still frequently used in official titles, in guilds, societies, sodalities and tongs more than a few centuries old, in historical fiction, and to lend a sense of pomp and tradition to what is generally a fairly undignified profession. The katacafe and katabateka or katabatheque are obvious examples of modern use in branding, either for establishments aimed at dungeoneers or for those courting an audience of groupies, wannabes, armchair adventurers &c. 

Solidarity 

    In the early 100th century, the formation of the UDW resulted in the creation of a different stripe of professional descent specialist. “There’s always a plan if you’ve got a UDW man,” the old slogan goes, and this is generally true. Investors and spectators complain about the slow pace of UDW digs; the UDW responds with a shrug and a gesture at their ten-times below-average mortality rate. 

    In order to maintain the symbiocombinist united front politics the combination has agreed to blacklist all digs that would require uncompensated relocation of native intelligences. This is still seen as a cowardly and conciliatory stance by ardent symbionists, and this is a major pain-point in unitfront politics. 

    You can always spot UDW dungeoneers by their hi-vis armor, their heavy-duty backpacks with their characteristic cordage- and wire-spool panniers, and their massive fucking flamethrowers. Unlike your more conventional dungeoneer, the combies have no hesitation bringing massive gear and stationary artillery down there—their methodical style and logistics focus makes unwieldy equipment much less of a liability. 

The Down

    While the topside was weathering the Flood, the underside was subjected to the tribulations of the Millennium Drought. Many escaped Protomen settled there and, we now know, intermarried extensively with the local humans after a period of seemingly voluntary segregation. Others used some remnants of their semiotic inheritance to treat with Slaad and install themselves as wizard-kings, kind or cruel. These were basically Sword & Sorcery times, kind of a real Dark Sun of a chiliad, and are a favorite of underside authors as a rhetorical device, representing either a period of foreign oppression under the hyksos or a heroic age of grit, guile, and resilience, depending on the scribe’s leaning.

    Things hypothesized to originate from Protoman influence include: the cross-cultural recurrence of hero-cults, the Scholars (tone: reverent), the Scholars (tone: conspiratorial), the popularity of absinthe over hashish, harmonic music, and the cold sauna.

    Because of the harshness of the climate, the scarcity of food, and the brutality of the surviving polities (sometimes called ‘ark-states,’ mostly in topsider analysis) drove many underground, literally, and so there has always been a much larger human population. A parallel migration was presumably impossible for the bulk of antediluvian topsiders on account of their inability to breathe underwater and reach the bottom of the Hex-spanning ocean in order to get down there in the first place.

    The dungeoneer exists as a profession insofar as there are ‘local guides,’ but the literal physical space of the subsextene is embedded far more thoroughly into the undersider oecumene. They could even be described as a kind of Balkans, a long-settled but often fractious borderlands region where the most successful undersider state projects interface and clash with their Interdark counterparts. In this context, the dungeoneer and the soldier are united—the dungeoneer is simply a soldier, scout, guide, etc… who works underground. Something of a jianghu, too.

    Still, the terrain lends itself to irregular warfare. There’s a certain kind of specialist, skilled in traversal and dirty war, who resembles the topsider dungeoneer in generalities, if not in specifics. They train in urban and subterranean environments, consider basic skills of disguise, stealth, ambush, lockbreaking and entry to be essential tools of the trade, and often turn their expertise to less-than-legal ends. When politically-motivated, they are partisans, but when they are mercenary, they share an appellation with their topside counterparts.

    Up, down, east, west, north, south, left or right, if you’re one of these tricky buggers, you’re called a

Rogue

A: Certified for Katabasis, Pragmatics, +1 Move/Round

B: Alert, Ultravision, +1 Hit

C: Improved Pragmatics, +1 Hit

D: Uncanny Dodge, +2 Save

 

A: Certified for Katabasis

In order to be a board-certified Rogue, you need to demonstrate expertise in:

1. Lockpicking, device-tinkering, appraisal, and legerdemain.
2. An unassisted climbing speed of 10’ per six seconds on up to sheer surfaces.
3. Ability to move on a surface you are grappled to as though horizontal.
4. Proficiency with modern move-by-wire grappling rigs and airjet RCS.
5. Proficiency with all firearms and one-handed melee weapons (a fumble is disqualifying).

Since you are a board-certified Rogue, you naturally have all of those things.

A: Pragmatics

You are trained to engage with minimum risk for maximum impact. There’s no space for heroics down in the tombs.

If at least one of these conditions is fulfilled, attacks add +1d4 to hit and damage. For each additional condition, the die is increased by one step - 1d4 → 1d6 → 1d8 → 1d10 → 1d12 → 1d20:

• Your target is surprised.
• Your target is panicking.
• Your target is stunned.
• Your target is in a prepared killzone.
• Your target is entangled.

B: Alert

When you are spotted by someone you’d rather not be seen by, activate a trap, fall into an ambush, or otherwise enter a moment of high peril, you can make a single reflexive action - either a move or an attack.

B: Ultravision

Your eyes sparkle with blacklight glow. You have ultravision, which is like infravision but better. In addition to seeing in pitch dark, ultravision offers several benefits:

When viewed under ultravision , people's eyes emit cones of light like bullseye lanterns, revealing their line-of-sight. The color and intensity ranges from dull red to blinding white depending on the acuity of their vision and their level of attentiveness.

The footsteps of non-Rogues appear blue-glowing and lightly smoking, and their fingerprints glow with faint phosphorescence. These traces are wiped clean with the touch of sunlight.

Treasure emits an inviting buttery-gold glow, like soft firelight, which can often be seen through the crack of a closed chest or the aperture of a keyhole.

Other Rogues of fewer templates than yours are blacklit.

The information gained through ultravision is conveyed in spoiler tags, ||like this||. Ultravision is fundamentally the power to perceive secrets, and so you too are bound to secrecy. If you directly tell anyone else what you've seen with your ultravision you lose the power for a day and a night—you, and you alone, have to figure out how to act on the information you've gleaned.

C: Improved Pragmatics

When you are in the position to use your Pragmatics, your critical range is expanded by 1 for each condition you fulfill. If you fulfill all five, your target simply Fortitude Saves vs. Death on a critical.

D: Uncanny Dodge

Split your perception in two - close one eye to anchor half in place. For the next minute, you exist in a superposition of reality and simulation - if you open your eye, it is revealed to have been fantasia and you return to the moment at which you closed it. Otherwise, you may open it safely once the minute has passed to confirm the truth.

You can do this once per eye per day. To others, this appears as you occasionally blinking and then stepping back as if you have miraculous foreknowledge of the swinging axe that would’ve otherwise cleaved you in half - an uncanny dodge.

 

 

 

True Violence (Not Shitpost)

 OK, so the last post was me being a little bit puckish, a little bit silly, a little bit goofy with it - but also, I genuinely do think a mechanic like that achieves the basic goals of Violence by Luke Gearing, designer of very well-written and poorly-edited game Wolves Upon the Coast, more or less adequately while being a hell of a lot simpler.

However, if I were to ruin that purity and therefore make it not really very funny but probably more serviceable, I would add the following rules:

• Saves vs. Death succeed on 12+; 8+ if wearing a helmet or in cover; 4+ if both.
• A ballistic vest allows the conversion of a single failed Save into being knocked on your ass; a plate carrier allows you to easily swap in new plates. 
• Autofire imposes a penalty to the Save equal to the number of rounds fired.
• Suppressing fire has a percentile chance of hitting those out of cover equal to the number of rounds fired.
• In hand-to-hand combat, apply a penalty to the opponent's Save, and a bonus to your own, equal to the number of people you have ever killed in hand-to-hand combat.  

 

True Violence

 If attacked, Save vs. Death.

A Really Obvious Solution to Player Consumable Hoarding

See the title. Putting the post out there with rapid turnaround and minimal polish because this is a very low-hanging fruit idea that I haven't really seen done before, and I suspect it might generate some productive discussion/elaboration.

 

Provenance unclear - seems to have been made either by "Artur Popkins," 

"Artur Mukhametov," or "Trevor Henderson."

 

Players hoarding consumables is a classic issue. There's some deep-seated component of our psyche that makes us desperately want to save things for the perfect moment, which results in them not getting used at the right moment. It struck me earlier that there is an obvious solution to this—give consumables both a short-term strong effect and a permanent weak effect. Now there's another consideration to balance the scales: the longer they hold onto the consumable, the longer they forgo the permanent benefit. 

You could introduce a gambling/randomness element here, if you'd like. 

Some obvious worked examples, to illustrate:

1. Elixir of Health - Upon use, restores the user to full HP, and gives a permanent +1 maximum HP.
2. Longevity Pill - Upon use, renders you immune to unnatural aging effects for a day and a night, and increases your maximum lifespan by +10 years.  
3. Tiger Balm - Rub on your hands to lengthen and harden your nails into wicked claws, dealing 1d8 damage. These last until filed off and are disruptive to tasks requiring manual dexterity, but can also be cut down to less obtrusive points that deal 1d4 against unarmored foes.
4.  Scroll of Magic Missiles - Read to cast Magic Missile at 2 MD. Upon use, you have an INT% chance of a flash of insight that permanently teaches you the spell, whether or not you can cast it - knowing the spell does not grant you the MD needed for it.
5. And So Forth - Et cetera...

Please enjoy this good idea that I just had.