Tuesday, November 29, 2022

10,000 Chambers of the Cnite King

Deep within the turgid reaches of the Samarkand Desert, a lone crag of withered sandstone presents a visage long scoured by time.

Samuele Bandini

The Cnite King's immured scowl scrapes against the setting sun. His arrogance stocked each chamber of his tomb with riches and idols of lands conquered, a ransom for the King to let forth the rising sun each morn. Dust, raiders, and collapse have taken much of this ransom, leaving the sun churning in an pale sunrise until it rolls around to the other side of the sky, dropping downwards like a pebble in a well.

Within the darkened chambers of the Cnite King, his mirrored ceilings show any light back to its bearers, casting delicate sandstone carveries into overlapping shadows. Bring your torches, your lanterns. Bear a flicker of light into those dusty arcades. Strip old treasures and darken the day one room further. Or die to forgotten creatures, leaving your lucre as a tiny portion of the ancient ransom, and cast another ray from the dying sun.

Rumors Fools may Follow to their Doom (1d6):

In the Ten-Thousandth Chamber, there Exists the King's Sarkophagus, within which Lies Gems and Trinkets as Multifarious as the Desert Sands.
Many Devices to Capture the Light may be Found Within - Some Capable of Shewing Events yet to Pass.
My Sister Told me Once of a Great Sphere of Purest Chalcedony, Relic of a Forgotten God, which yet holds Domain over Tracts of Wild Waters Untamed.
Ancient Warriors still Slumber, Unbeaten in all their Years except by the King, Serving him as a Master. Their Decaying Minds hold Stratagems and Pracktices Unknown to any Alive.
Within the Crumbling Walls, Strange Gurglings give way to Living Light, Ravenous, desiring a Taming from the King's Gauntlet.
Travellers Speak of Indigo Mushrooms which cause many Effects Mystikal, some Beneficent, some Maleficent, but Descriptive and Locative of the King's Treasures.

This is a mostly randomly iterated and improvised OSE dungeon delve, in a spirit intended for me to be as easy to pick up and run as possible, with 5 minutes notice, some paper, and some dice. Spark tables and links are included below to serve as an index. The game will hew as close to the written rules of OSE as possible, for my amusement and ease of adjudication.
This dungeon is intended to be open table, broadly FLAILSNAILS compatible, and to serve as one locus for play. It should slot into a larger assemblage of dungeons run by other masters as one blip in a hexmap. Credit to LichesgetStitches for coming up with the idea and encouraging me to talk about it.

Spark Tables:

Structure Seed Words:

Sandstone
Mould
Faceted
Arabesque
Nested
Delicate

Encounter Seed Words:

Riddling
Handsy
Echoing
Many-legged
Reverse
Shadowed

Special Rooms: (don't look if you want to play this dungeon!)

Map of the 10,000 Chambers constructed from splits of wood smaller than a toothpick. Incredibly delicate. A random quadrant is mostly destroyed, but the rest can be used for rough mapping. Contents of rooms are indicated, but very outdated.
Big drain, plugged up. If uncorked:

Drains any liquid in the room.
Drains the air at voracious speed for 1d4 rounds, then stops.
Living Light bubbles up.
Green Slime bubbles up.

Trap
Trap
Trader
Hall of Mirrors.

Index of Links:

World Map

This map should look familiar......

The 10,000 Chambers of the Cnite King is the black pentagram at 01,11.

Other Dungeons in the Assemblage:

To be filled out as people put their own out.

Discord Link

Upcoming!

Credits:

Phlox of Whose Measure for many of the helpful links I used.

Liches of LichesgetStitches for organizing this.

Friday, June 24, 2022

QHWC: HEIMJING

Inspired by Library of Attnam.

The trees around yellow like butter left overlong in air, then darken into crisp black spears. Through its windows, orange light flickers from the gentle tone of an orange peel to the red glare of sunset through a ruby.

The forge continues its work.

Each sill spread thickly with a layer of ash. Your feet will perch on their tops, where grime has collected. Let the soot thread its way into your hair as you enter. Take a long breath of dry heat.

Crooked figures stalk the low ceilings, staring into your eyes through gaps in dusty stacks of charcoal, as they stamp towards the furnaces, casting sheaves of that blackened fuel into its maw. Others rise and fall over the bellows, ancient shoulders swollen, pinching their heads between their bulk.

In the workshop, sparks cast out across the stifling air seeking tinder fruitlessly, cast out from each thick hammerstrike clanging off a yellow bit of metal. The shape is slowly coming into relief, as it has one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand times. The ceiling is covered with them. Near the windows, they rust when the few droplets make it inside from the melting snows.

Occasionally, the huge figure quenches its task in a greasy black pot which rises quickly to steaming, then withdraws the blackened metal tool from the oil, turning it over with the slow patience of exhaustion.

A small sound of clattering arises from between its feet. It lumbers outwards towards the windows, seeking a rusty scrap to reforge. At this time, and only this time, its silhouette can be seen stooping, blocking the orange flicker with a dense blackness.

The task begins again.

HEIMJING beta here.

Thursday, March 31, 2022

Buckets of Blood: JANITOR

WHO CLEANS UP THIS BLOOD?

THERE ARE BUCKETS OF BLOOD - WHO CLEANS UP THE GODDAMNED BLOOD, YOU SLOPPY PIZZA-GREASE-SLATHERED CHIPMUNKS, MY GOD I HATE YOUR PUERILE FUCKING FACES. GET THAT - THAT FUCKING SLIMY BURRITO AWAY FROM THESE FLOORS - I'M GOING TO FLAY YOU AND MAKE THAT RATTY SCRUFFY SCALP OF YOURS INTO A FUCKING DISHTOWEL GET BACK HERE

[.m4a audio clip found on a 2017 Samsung. Device's battery combusted violently before playback was finished.]

Pissants. Every last god-damned burger-munching booger-wiping Monster-pounding one of them. If dust is the gentle excreta of a building to its horizontal surfaces, a message strained through sunbeams, these bipeds overflow from every orifice with radioactive slag.

We clean up your empty Takis bags, discarded vape cartridges, and toilets. Blood-busters. Stain-slayers. Fucking Knights of Sanitizer (the Holy Ratio: One Part San and Six Parts Water).

JANITOR

Look, if you had gear or skills, you would be doing something else.

A: Deckswabbing, Essential Worker

B: Closet, Keyring
C: Bag It, After Hours

D: The Little God Of Little Places

Deckswabbing

If there's a mess, you can clean it in under an hour. Don't try me with who, where, how, or when. For the bad mommas of messes - we're talking decapitations, the busful of sick tweenagers, motile clots of soaked TP - it produces 1d4 BUCKETS filled with the absolute dregs of molecular matter. Each BUCKET is capable of befouling an entire room, no matter how large. Anyone close enough to smell it that isn't you can't breathe. Anyone who touches it with bare skin becomes ritually unclean. Anyone who drinks the stuff - fuck, man.

Essential Worker
If it's a building which contains humans who excrete, you know the location of the maintenance entrance and fit in as long as you avoid making eye contact with anyone and carry the tools of your trade. This does not get you past actively guarded thresholds, locked doors, or into rooms full of people in white coats unless your services are required.

Keyring
When entering a building you don't have the keys for, you can unlock 1D4 DOORS. Why 1d4? Well, every time you unlock a DOOR, roll 1d4. On a 1, the keys stop working for that building. Did you prop the swing doors open?

Closet

Using your KEYRING, you can declare, before rolling the 1d4, that you are unlocking your CLOSET, which contains enough space to prop up one human-shaped corpse into a standing position. (If you actually do this, the corpse will fall out dramatically when the door opens.) The CLOSET can be used to store anything which fits inside. It maintains a constant temperature of 69 degrees Fahrenheit and has a dim orange bulb with a pullcord.

Anything you put inside the CLOSET stays there, with the exception of:

Any device which contains music from Def Leppard's High and Dry, ZZ Top's Eliminator,
An object colored #DF73FF,
Anything alive.

A musical device will be exchanged for a blunt rolled with dark brown paper. The object will be replaced by a jittery confetti-under-a-halogen-light shaded object-sized void which can be superimposed over unwanted things. Latex gloves can be used to manipulate the void, which has the texture of Space Sand, and gradually shrinks over the course of a day into something small, dark, and wrinkled.

Anything alive is no longer, medically speaking, 'alive.' If multiple living creatures are placed in the CLOSET, when reopened, its surfaces will become tacky, like honey, and unreliable.

Bag It
When you're inside a building, if a thing can be lifted by you and your friends and staggered over to a large trash can, you can dump it in, regardless of the state, size, or type of entity, and it vanishes inside, not to emerge if you tie the top of the trash bag. If this would overfill the bag, you have 30 seconds after departing the building to get the bag into a dumpster, or it explodes.

After Hours

If you run into someone inside a building who shouldn't be there, and you're alone, you can tell them to leave, and they will. Strange and terrible creatures will move out of earshot once. If you run into them again that's your problem.

The Little God of Little Places
It speaks to you from the darkness in between the drywall, a closed toilet stall, the drippings left underneath a trash bag. If you placate it, you can close your eyes and step between the little places inside a building.

If you open your eyes mid-step, you end up impossibly wedged into a small place, and it runs its little fingers over your mashed lips and presses its dense little bulk against you.

They won't find anything besides a set of keys and a rolled-up trash bag.

Wednesday, December 15, 2021