Places

[TheGSE]

Before the Violet City: There's not much Canonical information about the lands east of the Violet City, so feel free to make something up!

Many-Mirror:

Sunset-in-the-East:

Hightunnel:

Gardens of Two-Day:

Hot Gate:

Hole House:

Sunrise-in-the-West:

Safranj:

Oranje:

Emerald City:

Red Land District:

Ruins Azure:

Red End:

Edited May 6 by TheGSE (see edit history)

[TheGSE]

Beyond the Violet City:

 

1. VIOLET CITY: A LAST EERIE HOUSE
This is the end of the Right Road.
Humanity's dominions wind down in the purple haze that wreathes the sunrises of this western reach. No roads, but caravans brave the Ultraviolet Grassland into the eternal sunset of the Black City. Porcelain Princes and Spectrum Satraps oversee great herds of biomechanical burdenbeasts that bring the odd fruits, black light lotus, indigo ivories, rainbow silks, and sanguine porcelains popular among the meritocrats of the Rainbow Lands. Many voyagers are taken by the vomes but nobody likes to talk of those lost to the ultras.

2. THE LOW ROAD AND THE HIGH
The cratered viaduct of the High Road runs on crumbling pylons of dying dryland coral across the pallid grasses. Beneath the half-passable testament to the follies of the Long-Long-Ago, the Low Road winds, smeared threads of soil and loam and oil and blood ground into a hard surface by the pounding feet, hooves, wheels, and treads of pilgrims, nomads, caravans, and vechs.

3. STEPPE OF THE LIME NOMADS
The Limey Nomads’ lands are harsh and dry, forbidding to travelers. Odd remnants from the misty period referred to as the ‘Best-Forgotten’ Ages by the Saffron City's Opiate Priests dot the plain. In spring the Limeys graze west towards the Grass Colossus, returning east to the Circle Rim for winter.

4. PORCELAIN CITADEL
The unmarked white surface of the great citadel, uplifted like an imprecation against the fanciful gods, serves as a reminder that not all that has fallen has died.
Four robed figures arrayed before the decayed defense golems turn their faceless glazed masks as one. “This stair leads to the High Houses. Only permitted penitents may ascend to serve us there. Stay back, our Pillars of Power remain as potent as in your forgotten Long, Long Ago,” they speak in an impeccable chorus of disparate voices.

5. POTSHERD CRATER
Scrub. Pallid soils of crushed ceramics. Drifts of porcelain exoskeletons crunch and ring underfoot. The autumn and spring rain showers bring sudden blooms of flowers and tubers, covering the pale landscape in a rainbow of colour.
The rim rises pale, like fossilized porcelain ribs, from the dusty soil. Remnants of quarries from before the days of the Porcelain Princes lie abandoned to vomish lurchers while the sanguine porcelain prospectors whisper of bat-lion caves in the far rims.

6. TRAIL OF VOMISH DREAMS
The grass grows high, sparkling and lush. Rumors say it is watered by sacrifice and an ancient Source Fac. Nomad Clans come here when grazing fails elsewhere, but cluster in thornstone enclosures close to the trail, driven to cooperation by the deadly machine-infested giant beasts that regularly traverse the steppe.

7. GRASS COLOSSUS
Crossing a last purple ridge, the wide vale promises relative respite from the harsh grassland. Trees dot the courses of two rivers and, at their juncture, rise prehistoric ramparts of pitted ceramic with traces of pre-wizard spell-arms on their ancient shellac surface.
Inside, on one of two hillocks, looms a great wicker-man of woven grasses, vines, and thorn bushes. Shamans of many clans make their meets here, teach their memory chants, and welcome the Clan Mothers once a year for the festival of the Circle of Grass.

8. THE LAST SERAI
Three days out, you sight it. A metallic stepped tower, glinting in the daylight, glowing a ghostly, coppery green by night. Two days out, you smell it. Soft and seductive like cocoa. A day out, you hear it. Drumming out a rhythmless, rumbling staccato. Closing in on the tower you see three buildings, like hunched old men, clustered in the lee of a cinder dune. Around the tower a circle of gentle dust floats in a massive static charge. Nothing living grows within that circle. There the Last Serai's grand old harmonic rods draw energy from that magical field, powering the great hold of the Porcelain Princes while selling the excess to the last trading house of the Violet City and the final embassy of the Spectrum Satraps.

9. THE WAY STONE GRAVEYARD
Larger by far than the Ignored Tower in the Last Serai, a crumbling verdigris obelisk rises from the bare bedrock, exposed by millennial storms lashing the tired earth. Surrounded by wrinkled iron husks and a veritable graveyard of Long Long Ago machine creatures.

10. THE DEATH-FACING PASSAGE
A sharp, artificial canyon runs rough but true North-West towards the Grass Colossus. The rough crags and cinder dunes, lit from behind by the glare of static ghosts (L0, glowing), are littered with reminders to not turn back: the flickering soul-echoes of travelers seduced by the siren song of the Ignored Tower's Face of Death. Travelers say not every look at the tower from this angle brings death but most prefer not to try. Four or five days along the passage, past a landslide, the Face is mercifully obscured. The upland above the canyon is a pandemonium of shattered rock and odd twists of stuckforce coated in millennia of dirt and grime. Sages stroke their beards but cannot agree on the origin of this hellish scape.

11. THE SOUTH-FACING PASSAGE
Rough, high steppe country, torn by the tracks of prehistoric Behemoths, but relatively safe. The journey from the Grass Colossus to the Behemoth Shell will interest every gentle-person naturalist. Due west the rounded humps of great cedarshaded hills rise, but the caravan trails bypass them.

12. FALLEN UMBER
Beyond the Way Stone the steppe continues, flat, tasteless, tone-deaf. The caravan trails have carved a route down to the bedrock and the long-dry gully buttresses of gently crumbling livingstone attest to the long-lost land of Umber, once rich from local deposits of titanic biomatter which supported a thriving chitin-cap agro-industrial aristocracy.

13. LONG RIDGE
On the way to the Serpent's Stone the grasslands fold back and forth on themselves like sinuous serpents undulating under the coating of ash-white grasses waving in the gentle breezes. Little steppe rodents peer into air, great eagles circle overhead, and for once, little trace of the disgusting remnants of the Long Long Ago are seen.

14. BEHEMOTH SHELL
What were these things? These mountainsized calcite encrusted creatures that suspended themselves on levitation lenses and drifted and dragged themselves along the surface? Sages speculate demiurges might have used them to sculpt the world, to deiform it closer to some divine ideal. Most are gone. The logarithmically multispiralled shell of the greatest of their kind slumps here, a lumpy mountain like a cross between a sea urchin and a conch. The Satraps may claim it but, truly, it belongs to the Great Folk who live upon and in it, scurrying like lice within its ageless bulk.

15. SERPENT STONE MARKER
Beyond the Long Ridge the steppe flattens out and becomes a flat ocean of white grass. From horizon to horizon, the world spreads flat and still. In its depth lies a great stone marker; smooth, rising a foot above the soil, and five hundred paces across. The entire surface shifts in curiously fractal serpent patterns of chocolate and amber. Compasses and guidestones swirl madly, then point themselves towards the stone, helping voyagers in this swirling place. Smaller markers dot the whole steppe, gently eroding and being reclaimed, pointless memorials from the Long Long Ago.

16. MOON-FACING FORD
The expanse of the steppe seems endless, from north to south the flat land rolls on under the sky dome. The slow stars and the fast glitter, icy and cold, and voyagers from the four corners approach the Moon River with exaggerated care. The great shallows of the Moon-Facing Ford mark the easiest passage between the light grasslands and the dark. Weaker caravans—or those with something to hide—seek other, far deadlier crossings.
Why Moon-Facing? Because as visitor's approach the ford their mouths go slack and their faces rise to gaze upon the Near Moon, suspended incongruously above the plain, half-concealed by the curve of the world.

17. THE NEAR MOON
Whispers only came to the Violet City of this oddity—a spherical moon come to Earth, suspended less than a bow-shot above the ashen soil of the Grassland. The mile-high sphere, dusty and cratered, mocks astounded travelers.
In the noon-daylight the Near Moon looms ash-grey, the colour of a ghost's ghost, but come sunset or if sunrise could pierce the thick haze of the grasslands, it would burn with the colours of a funeral pyre. Skyscrapers and towers and stairs of a halfdozen fallen cultures slither out of the dank
bogs beneath the Moon, peopled by hermits, hardy soldiers, and ka-zombie keeping moonlings of quaint disposition. They bridge the
airy void, coming within a ten-foot of the Near Moon and its strange gravity.

18. GLASS BRIDGE
The High Moon Steppe and the High Horse Steppe are sliced asunder one from the other by the deep valley of the Old River, the turbulent outflow from the cold, deep Three Sticks Lake. Both steppes are as cold and as cruel as their names suggest, studded with mesas, splinters, boulders, and craters left over from the near cosmic forces that created the Cantilevered Rim. Past the amalgamated skyscraper of Red Bear Village, the valley bursts open to the astounding sight of Glass Bridge: a cathedral of glass that sparkles in the daylight and phosphoresces in the ultraviolet mornings.

19. THREE STICKS LAKE
Three ragged villages cling to the steep shores of the cold, deep lake, built on layers of older settlements from the Long Long Ago. Caravans drag themselves around the harsh coastline, while smaller groups cross on the improvised and salvaged ferries of the Stick Folk.
The lake itself is cold and full of fish, its bed—so it seems—thick with waterlogged vomes ready to drag careless bathers into the ultramarine depths. It is one of the deepest and darkest lakes known to the Steppelanders, a vital source of water and, even if one compromises comfort, respite in the Three Living Villages.

20. THE GALL GRASS
A wide, high, and dry valley, decked in the pungent yellow stalks and interwoven galls of the slow-dreaming distributed sentience of the modified grasses holds sway here. The Gall Grass mind (L14, post-conscious) absorbs all moisture here and keeps the Hair Woods to the south and the Higher Spinewood to the north at bay.
Little survives in the Gall Grass—thirst is a constant danger but the mildly empathic grass mind also keeps most predators at bay.

21. SPECTRUM RUN
Fires of prismatic sentience gone mad light the crystal excrescences that mark old Satrap experiments and settlements. Whether the crystals are successes or failures, the Satraps do not tell. Black glyphs mark the trails of nomads and adventurers from the Circle Sea, while the Satraps follow light shows of bold, avant-garde design through the pancake-flat terrain. A frosting of metallic salts kills the grasses in great rings around the eerily unrusted corpses of grand traveling machines from Long Ago.

22. REFRACTING TREES
Light bends oddly here, the bark of the trees coated in a slimy sheen. Long Ago mad experiments created tree-silicon symbionts and now most voyagers are cautioned to wear neutral-density eyewear lest the strange geometries scald their minds.
Distances break with confusing abandon and smart voyagers stick to the ditch roads left by centuries of heavy vechs. Fools wander off and are lost in the broken planes of light. Nomads prefer to avoid these wooded, stream-carved lands altogether.

23. RIBS OF THE FATHER
A bone formation the size of a small mountain range erupts from the ground, creating a landmark visible for a week and more in each direction. The old, eroded bone range, garlanded in ancient long-needle pines, is usually capped by snow-heavy clouds. The Satraps mutter uneasily of the swift-breeding Marmotfolk that live upon and within its bulk.

24. THE CAGE RUN
A great avenue of fused terranova runs due north from the Ribs, passing by the Spectrum Palace and disappearing into the elf-haunted north. The terranova road surface is a wondrous artifact of Long Ago, a ruddy artificial stone that resists both weather and vehicles. Rows of ritualistic metal trees were once arrayed along the length of the road. Many have been removed and reused since the road was abandoned by its builders, but hundreds remain, most decked with Satrap cages holding the bones of Marmotfolk and other interlopers who threatened Satrap dominance.

25. SPECTRUM PALACE
The palace of the powerful Spectrum Satraps is surprisingly small: a drum-shaped thing of dull metal and rivets, thirty meters lengthwise and across, and a hundred meters around, in the shallow saddle between two unremarkable hills. A single doorway of pitch black looms ominous upon its southern face. Every night full-spectrum localized aurorae light the sky above the palace—hence its name.

26. THE IRON ROAD
Striking out due west from the Ribs, the Iron Road is a series of mammoth skeletal iron towers, red and rusting, like an army of giants marching into the sunset. They continue for more than a week's walking and Spectrum scholars claim that in the Long Ago cable wagons flew from one tower to the next, simulating the flight of an eagle or golden sky barge.
At irregular intervals grand arcologies in once-livingstone erupt from the deep steppe like immense geometric termite mounds. Dew and earth saps collect in them, and hardy trees form eerie vertical forests in the southern reaches of the Ivory Steppe.

27. THE IVORY PLAIN
The trackless deep plain is a sea of ivory grass that glows palely in the dark. Great herds of grazing beasts and their predators make their way across this plain in stately procession under the harsh ultraviolet radiation raining down from the hazy sky. Eroded livingstone stubs and glassy patches scored upon the ground are all that remains of some older time, like long-healed scars on a mild-mannered old warrior.

28. DEAD BRIDGE
The Chasm, forty miles wide, marks the western extremity of the Ultraviolet Grasslands. Its depths are shrouded by a noxic haze. The projectors of glittering force bridges rust on the precipices of the chasm, and only one single archaic bridge of livingstone and dryland coral remains. It stumbles from organiform pier to organiform pier, overgrown and distended into a riot of towers and walkways.
The old power generators are long dead and the lights long gone, but the Dead Bridge still teems with life—only now, instead of the engineer aesthetes of the Glittering Heavenly Republic, it is degenerate quarterlings and crawling subhumans.

29. DARK LIGHT PATH
At its northern edge the Chasm branches and breaks out into canyons, craters, and calderas. Many cultures have built staircases, tunnels, hanging bridges, and cableways across the chaotic terrain. All in disrepair, but travelers still descend them into the eternal twilight of the Dark Light Path: a
series of parallel grooves cut east to west through the mesas and ridges, as though the fine-grained stone were soft clay.
The depths of the Chasm are shrouded in a noxic haze, obscuring the passage of the sun, but they are not dark—the passage walls glitter with phosphorescent shock gemstones and sparkling thermovores move like stately half-floating crabs through the thick, soupy air.

30. THE ENDLESS HOUSES
Beyond the Dead Bridge lays endless ruinland. For over a week the landscape marches, a mind-numbing grid-work of abandoned houses, towers, palaces, monuments, aqueducts, and roads.
Old death lies over the gently collapsing land like a comforting blanket, keeping out change, exhausting volition, tiring the rain itself. Deep ravines have chiseled apart antique roads over uncounted years.

31. THE FOREST OF MEAT
Long ago somebody, somewhere thought it would be a great idea if easily harvested protein grew on trees. Animals would no longer be slaughtered for their life-giving flesh. Packaging and delivery would be simplified. Whole industries and cultures would be disrupted and innovation would create a thriving new proteinomic class.
The carnibotanic disaster zone of the Forest of Meat creeps up on the traveler slowly. The trees grow thicker and fleshier, leaves begin to leer, birds fall silent, shrubberies click thorns like teeth, soil runs red with slime, mushroom eyes open in sudden clearings and, by night, howls of willow wolves (L3, fleet-rooted) echo across drinking bogs.

32. BLACK CITY
The Omega. The Last City. Godspeed you, Black City. It hunches upon the shore of an endless, oily ocean, a lacquered black chaos of cubes that seem to slide one across another in almost-patterns that ever so slightly fail to repeat. The corpses of fools who tried to walk into the Black City lie in the toxic dust of the Pre-city. Hair stands on edge with the background electromagnificent radiation.

>TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED
>ABORT / RETRY / DIE?

Edited May 6 by TheGSE (see edit history)