Twenty Questions, Tentatively Answered
Twenty Questions, Tentatively Answered
What is the deal with my cleric's religion?
The sunburnt preachers of the Enduring Empire want you to remember your history, and trust your ancestors, and call your mother more often. They wander the endless october landscape like bent scarecrows in their ill-fitting suits, leaving sweet bread and white candles at lonely graves and in the crooks of old trees where travelers carve the names of those they left behind. Below their feet, the imperial cultists of the Shattering Kingdom gather blood to feed the queen-in-exile, who will reign again. They are bright and smiling and awful, and have exquisite taste in finery.
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| Agostino Arrivabene |
Elsewhere, gods are local, and abstract. The world is a confusing and hungry place. You are always keying in hidden combinations of words and deeds and pictures that make things happen. There are visible rules and invisible ones. So you do your best. Gods are where the knots of rituals come together. It’s the thing you have to appease, wherever you are. In Gul it’s the rain and the sickness and the maze. In the mountains it’s the air and the fall and the machines. In the salt-march it’s always hunger, and nothing else. The priests do their best to carry the burden, but it’s never quite enough. The world is always hungry. If you survive, you retire to Asphodel, to drink jasmine tea and ask “What is a god, really?” to a halfway mellified monk carried by gargoyles. You won’t survive.
There’s no cleric class, but you can still be one, if you like to fight losing battles for people who don’t appreciate it.
Where can we go to buy standard equipment?
Adventurer isn’t a job per se, so you’re probably journalists or lab assistants or outlaws. Look for stores with no signs on shadowed side streets, and stalls hidden in the twisting alleys of vast bazaars, and derelict buildings where shuffling shapes gather in pitch darkness. Don't ask questions, get what you need.
Where can we go to get platemail custom fitted for this monster I just befriended?
People don't wear metal armor any more, not really, but if you just want to bling out your beastie, your best bet would be Teras, at the heart of the Titanomachy, where the Ragged King and his court flourish forever. Just be very specific about what you want: tastes there run mercurial and impractical. If you want actual plate mail, you could go to the salt march. They make things there out of metal and moss and stone, if you can keep them fed.
Who is the mightiest wizard in the land?
There aren’t wizards, because there isn't Magic. But there is magic, and there are witches. The Witch-Queen of Zeboim is the whole of the sky sometimes, and her teeth close around the sun, and the clouds are her tail, because it amuses her. So the story goes.
Who is the greatest warrior in the land?
Notionally, the Dead Empress, rotten in her armor, her head like a waterlogged corpse and a mummified jackal both at once, blind-eyed, wrapped in her mangy, black-feathered wings. Her sword is a calendar of saints the size of a small car. Should the Enduring Empire ever be at risk of final doom, she will rise to defend it. But the Enduring Empire will never fall, so that will never happen.
The Brass Men saith: "He is the greatest of all warriors, in that He is the greatest of men in that aspect as He is in all others, as He is in greatness in and of Men and in and of the Greatness in and of Men." Who knows what that means?
Who is the richest person in the land?
Apokreta belongs to the Princess, and Apokreta is a bountiful land full of wise people and clever invention, we are told. Though we do not see anyone, when we come to Apokreta. Perhaps they're all on holiday. If we’re talking about liquid assets, that would be any one of the alchemist houses of Verdigris. Their heirs and fortunes are the most changeable thing in the Enduring Empire, but they’re all very, very rich.
Where can we go to get some magical healing?
Nowhere. You could go to the Black City and supplicate yourself before the Witch-Queen, I suppose. A doctor is usually better.
Where can we go to get cures for the following conditions: poison, disease, curse, level drain, lycanthropy, polymorph, alignment change, death, undeath?
Every snake-oil salesman east and west of Gul has a million proprietary curatives, medicines, and salves. Most of them work. Some even work without horrific side effects. Apokreta may be your best bet for really expensive or dangerous procedures– some say only those dying of poison or sickness live in Apokreta. But there are a hundred aspiring mad scientists who'd kill to make their big break by bringing you back from the brink of death. Don’t go to Rainmouth.
Undeath is like being someone else's memory of you. The cure to undeath is apathy, the way the cure to life is death.
Is there a magic guild my MU belongs to or that I can join in order to get more spells?
There’s no capital-M Magic, just lowercase-m magic. So no spells, and no theory of magic. Just a bunch of weird stuff that happens. Like emotional, poetical reality overriding material reality. If your magic user is an Orphean, wander the courts of the moon in search of inspiration, and make pacts with muses. If they're a Witch, eat monsters.
Where can I find an alchemist, sage or other expert NPC?
Everywhere. You can’t walk ten paces in this place without tripping over an alchemist or something of that ilk. Everyone who’s anyone is one, everyone who isn’t wants to be one.
The best are in Apokreta, supposedly. The most accessible are in the Titanomachy's endless satellite states, often running them as laboratories for their mad whims. The most reliable are in Verdigris, where they sit in their offices sucking down colored smoke and paying people to do research for them.
The Enduring Empire's Nameless Capitol is made out of history. Some say it is the carbuncle where the past and the present press through one another. There who place is a vast dusty silent mausoleum museum library. You are never being quite polite enough.
Don’t go to Rainmouth.
Where can I hire mercenaries?
Your best bet is the Empire's trade city, Canker, where the western train routes converge, or the Teras, where the appointed technocratic dictators of the Titanomachy's satellite cities shop for their mercenary armies. Plus, most rural train stations and caravan paths will have a few mercenary guards, either working or looking for work.
Is there any place on the map where swords are illegal, magic is outlawed or any other notable hassles from Johnny Law?
You shouldn't bring your guns to town, if you can avoid it, and you shouldn't brandish them, if you can't. People get antsy. In Asphodel, murderous intentions are sniffed out by vast termites that crawl up from the earth to devour you. Elsewise, you can always ask.
Which way to the nearest tavern?
Cities have nightclubs and restaurants and hotels. Towns might have something like that.
The Enduring Empire has nothing you can eat or drink– the dead subsist on the memory of sustenance, on dead leaves and rainwater and candy hearts.
The Salt March is a place of endless hunger. You'll scrape moss off rocks and gristle off bone. Mosquitos will rise over the edge of the world like a black sun. You'll die there.
What monsters are terrorizing the countryside sufficiently that if I kill them I will become famous?
You’d probably get more famous if you figured out how to make something out of them, or at least their spinal fluid or fingernails or something. Monster-hunters don’t get much respect outside of the rural areas that need them.
Are there any wars brewing I could go fight?
Nothing you can fight in just now. There hasn't been for a long time. But they're doing something in Rainmouth that's going to change the world. Something to do with the black stone layered under your feet. Making something like a computer, and something like a monster. Then everything is going to change. You might want to get ahead of that.
How about gladiatorial arenas complete with hard-won glory and fabulous cash prizes?
There was a city that ruled us, once upon a time. A heroic attempt by reality to impose some order and justice on a half-lit nowhere-place like this. They made a colony called Verity, which exported language and broke up falsehoods like potsherds to resculpt them. It was Valorous and Noble and True. There were wrestlers in Verity, who were something like this. Elsewhere, there are fixed fights and gambling rings and disappointment.
Are there any secret societies with sinister agendas I could join and/or fight?
Plenty. The most infamous of them was Scarecrow, which hoped to conquer the underworld and democratize death. Death is, and remains, a rigid hierarchy controlled by a complex bureaucracy, which a well-connected industrialist might be able to buy their way out of– space is at a premium down there, and the once-desolate roads are nowadays crowded with travelers all the time, pressed close enough to touch. Some people think of them as heroes, most do not. Most would prefer to entertain the possibility of escape.
Their name is an acronym, like this: S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
Each of these letters stands for the letter it stands for, like this:
S.
S.C.
S.C.A.
S.C.A.R.
S.C.A.R.E.
S.C.A.R.E.C.
S.C.A.R.E.C.R.
S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.
S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
S.C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
C.A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
A.R.E.C.R.O.W.
R.E.C.R.O.W.
E.C.R.O.W.
C.R.O.W.
R.O.W.
O.W.
W.
And so on like that in every direction forever.
If you want to learn more, you could always read their founding text, The Ultra Heuristic. There might be a few half-singed copies remaining in the dusty lockers of the San Ambrosius Citizens' Militia, or somewhere like that, if you care to heist it. It won't be a difficult heist, but it is just a musty old book written by a pseudonymous crank. Hardly worth the trouble.
You don't really want to know more about Scarecrow, or the horrible things they believed.
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| Kim Jakobsson |
(Curiously enough, no one can quite agree what happened to them, in the end. They're not in the underworld, certainly. Through the door at the end of the world, maybe, or across the sea, or into the ultrareality. That last would be troublesome.)
What is there to eat around here?
Depends where you go. There are little towns all over, and big ones like San Ambrosius and Santa Rocha. They have things like peach trees and avocados and nuts and farm giant birds and giant insects. There's a lot of oxygen in the air here. Things flourish.
In the Enduring Empire, there is nothing you can eat, mortal. Candyfloss and wishes and sunsets. They have a city at the confluence of rivers called Canker– a glut of mud and rot where nostalgia-poisoned fools go to indulge themselves to death. You can stock up on wine and salt meat and sugar meat and books that aren't as good as you remember.
The food in Gul is street food and hospital food and sour food left in cozy places, wherever you get it from, and it will all be delicious and it will all make you terribly sick.
The food in the Salt March, at the northeastern edge of the known world, is lichen and gristle and tide-pool animals. It's bugs eating you, it's diving face-first into black water. It's nothing at all, for a long long time.
The food in the Sea of Forests is you. It's everything, it's the whole world. Trolls are funny that way.
Down the coast from the Empire, from the March, down towards the sea, is the Wilting Kingdom. It's a peaceful, dreamy place, seaside cliffs and gossamer fog and little hostels painted different colors. Everything is affectedly rustic and simple and human, and all of it is more expensive than you can afford. This is where the children of mining barons and lumber barons and captains of industry go to retire at 35. The food is delicious, but you'll never taste it.
In the Titanomachy, you eat cafeteria food designed to give you proper nutrition, and don't ask what it's made of. Or, if you're in charge or in favor, you eat whatever you want– it's a riotous peacock tail of living flourishing blooming bleeding dying everything. You can walk the gardens and pluck peaches full of steak full of worms full of cream. You can bite off your own cufflinks and chew them like caramels. You can lick the wallpaper between meetings– the snozzberries taste like snozzberries. The Ragged King only eats his own body– chews his nails, sucks his hair, kisses his own thighs, so as to use all of himself he possibly can.
The Steppes Under The Mountains At The End Of The World are very agriculturally productive, but are known for their strange, massive tubers, in which whole civilizations of parasites rise and fall over the course of centuries, and from which they make some very rich vodka. Everything else there is dungeon ecology and machine-parasites, but it tastes rich and strange and only mutates you sometimes. Who knows what the Brass Men eat. Definitely not the dungeon meat. Probably ambrosia and bullets or something.
You shouldn’t care what they eat in Rainmouth, but the barbecue there is pretty good. Don’t go. Don't go. Don't go.
Any legendary lost treasures I could be looking for?
Before the Enduring Empire died (though it stands still, proud and lasting), it was the leading source of novel bioengineering research in the world. The search for their machines and creations in the wreckage-choked chasms of their unreclaimed underground cities has not been going well, though the Titanomachy is doing its best.
The Brass Men also left behind strange things on their pilgrimage to the Steppes: astrolabes that realign thoughts, factories that make hatred, and so on, but these are tricks, or they don't work, or nobody can figure out how to make them work, or all three. Still, you never know.
Where is the nearest dragon or other monster with Type H treasure?
Dragons supposedly live in the depths of the sea of forests, but no one credible has ever proven it. Honestly? Monsters are the treasure (both in terms of their treasured friendship and in terms of their many valuable and delicious organs).
What is the dark land, where no one goes?
Okay Fine, Rainmouth.
A barren, jagged coastal inlet that stands opposite the rain shadow of a tight ring of jagged grey mountains where nothing can grow. There’s one train that goes to Rainmouth.
There is a city there, unfortunately. It started as a research encampment: The Ragged King is notorious for selling off his satellite cities to charter companies and research agencies as the starting grounds for nascent, doomed industrial ventures.
Rainmouth (the inlet) is rich with Xolotite, the slick, crumbly black glass that accretes under the world's crust. Usually you need a mine to reach it. In Rainmouth, it breaches the surface in huge jagged spires, draws down the lightning, falls away in crackling reams.
Rainmouth (the city) was only supposed to last a few months: harvest, experiment, leave. Why does Xolotite attract lightning? Does it store the electricity inside it, somehow? What could it be used for?
It turns out, Xolotite is can be used for all kinds of things. Capacitors. Transformers. Lenses. Carve into its surface and make a logic gate. Show it something and catch the reflection. Swallow a little and see electromagnetic fields. Swallow a lot and die bleeding, but before that feel all the forces of the universe pressing and pulling and tasting you.
So now Rainmouth is a city. A slapdash, “we’ll only need this building for a few months,” “well, cram another wing into the laboratory, I don’t know, build it on top?” city, built on top of itself again and again into a tiny bit of space. A city of constant storms and ragged tarps and scaffolding and crackling neon pipes and streets that end abruptly on hundred-foot drops and security cameras crammed into every nook and cranny so the corporate board can maintain its desperate grip on anything at all.
If you go to Rainmouth, you'll be stabbed in an alley for your batteries, or press-ganged into a barely-functional smuggling operation, or grabbed by the ear by a passing executive and dragged into a damp cold room to be lobotomized and turned into a computer-slave with Xolotite lenses for eyes. Or worse. Or much much worse.
Don't go to Rainmouth.
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| F. Ruiz |
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