The Psytower and the Groaning Gale

The Radion PsyTower shimmers on the edge of the Groaning Gale, a perpetual malaise of wind and creaking sounds hovering over Lake Radion. Many animals and other creatures living in the lake and shore are prone to song but there is not much agreement on tune, key, or melody, hence the groaning. It is an area prone to confusion and mischief.

The Psytower is not so much built with a foundation as it is an idea. If you expect it to be there, it will be. 

When you expect it to be there and it hungers it manifests thus: garish colored blocks arranged in a haphazard fashion, ascending 10 stories though the upper floors are hidden by the gloom of the storm. The Groaning Gale gives it ample room, its creatures waiting to pick up whatever scraps remain after the feeding.

If you perk your ears up and listen very closely over the cacophony of tuneless song of the lake creatures, one can hear the strange, confused joyful laughter of many mouths. That is the grief laughter of the Lost Seraphim.

If the Psytower allows you to enter (and you really shouldn’t unless desperation or greed drive you to cross the threshold) you would find many stairs, driving you up and up to the great obelisk that bursts forth through the roof, anchoring the Seraphim as a Hope temptation, a vector for the hungry and desperate to attempt an act of foolish bravery. Whether a primal urge drove the Seraphim to this place far beyond its unholy plane of dark wonder or if a curse drove it here, it hungers for news from beyond, feeding its spirit as the Psytower slowly consumes it. Do not approach the Seraphim for in its hunger and desperation, its many eyes and mouths have been known to pull ones gaze, and in the pulling separate and segment the unwary into component parts, humor and ichor and bone sopping into the flagstones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Grinding Wheels of Disorder: A Method for Managing Factions and Their Moves

 I have struggled, and I know I am not alone in this, to maintain the movement of factions in my home campaign. When one plays biweekly, one is focused first on what the players will or could encounter at the table. I tend to prefer building campaigns that way, rushing a bit ahead of my players to hang drywall and slap up paint, creating a strange metallurgist intrigued by hypnotic space metals, what have you. But where this method (or lack of a real method) falls down is managing the various machinations happening "off screen". In my current campaign "Postcards from the Edge" which is based vaguely on Spelljammer 2e, there are four main factions which I have developed with my players during pre-session 0 world and character creation. I also have an intentionally deeply malevolent and authoritarian mindflayer faction, the Dominator Creed, or as they self style, "The Planar Voyagers".  As we are now a year into this campaign, I have found that it's diff...
Read more

Building an Interesting World through NPCs

This old post from 2021 now is resurrected.  I love building NPCs. It gives me great joy. I think the way to build an interesting world isn’t about lore that lives in a campaign Bible(what I think of as the Elder Scrolls lore problem) but is actualized by the characters the players meet. Whether it’s the cabbage man whose business the players destroyed in a battle with a Mimic pretending to be a Market Stall or the French veteran half orc married to a Warforged tower, it’s how you make the world real. Note: this approach is for important NPCs in your campaign but could be used in pieces to give more off the cuff NPCs some additional depth and flavor. Questions that inform how I build NPCs: Ask yourself, why is this NPC here? What does this NPC want? Who are they like in popular fiction? How can they help or hinder the PCs? What do they sound like? Voice/cadence, formal/informal, confident/timid? What aspects might they have? aka sentences that reflect them and their values (this is...
Read more

End of Year post

This has been a whirlwind of a year. I published a  game  and an  adventure ! I met lots of lovely people who write, make art, and create games. I blogged ( a little ). I did some freelance work on other folks projects. (I also released this via my email list which is available here:  Email List. ) But most importantly, I played games. Here are some cool adventures and games I played this year, in no particular order, definitely not all inclusive: Paranoid Android   by Armanda Haller This solo game is so tight! You are undergoing an interrogation to determine if you are an android and you get to discover that for yourself throughout the game. Awesome. Mythic Bastionland  by Chris McDowall I love questing and strange spiritual encounters with knight stuff. This is extremely up my alley and I can’t wait to see how it continues to evolve. I played this in a play by post game with a few games friends. Character: Enid the Unproven. Empyrean Dynasty   and...
Read more